Tam Warner Minton, MS
As a professional member of the Independent Educational Consultant’s Association (IECA) I joined a “talklist”. The talklist allows members to ask advice, post items of interest, etc. There are many rules regarding what can and cannot be discussed; it is a very professional “talklist”, and of great benefit. The other day I was astonished to see a link to The Chronicle of Education and an article entitled, How a Scholarship Corporation Tried to Muzzle a Blogger.
You need a subscription to see the whole article, but basically, my IECA colleague, Nancy Griesemer, an educational consultant and blogger (College Explorations), wrote a blog about the National Merit Scholarships and gave the state to state cutoff scores. In case you are unaware, the National Merit Scholarships require “an equitable” number of scholars geographically, and therefore, each state has a different cut off score. Is this unfair? Well, yes, depending on how you look at it. If you based National Merit on score only, regardless of state, there would be states that would not be represented. (You can see the cut off scores at Fairtest.org). You only need a score of 201 to qualify as a semifinalist in Wyoming, but you need a score of 221 to qualify in Massachusetts or Maryland. Nancy explained this on her blog, and posted the scores (which can be found online, so it is not confidential information). What happened next is incredible: “Ms. Griesemer received a telephone call from Eileen Artemakis, the corporation’s director of public information. Ms. Artemakis asked Ms. Griesemer for the name of her lawyer.” Long story made short: National Merit Scholarship Corporation told my colleague that she had published “proprietary data”, even though the data can be found online and is published every year in it’s “Guide to the National Merit Scholarship Program” that is sent to high schools.
The lawyer for the corporation sent Ms Griesemer a letter stating that she could not post “copyrightable material” that was printed in the Guide and warned her to remove the scores and all mention of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation from her blogs. Stating that she felt bullied, she did so. What she also did was contact “Robert A. Schaeffer, public-education director for FairTest, a testing watchdog group that has long challenged the scholarship program’s eligibility rules”. Mr. Schaeffer previously filed suit claiming gender bias in the exam which prompted changes in the said exam. “That complaint prompted changes in the exam, yet Mr. Schaeffer continues to chide the organization for not disclosing the racial and ethnic breakdown of students who receive its scholarships, which he and other critics contend disproportionately benefit white and Asian students from upper-income families.” Mr. Schaeffer immediately published the cut off scores for 2010 on his website, www.fairtest.org along with an article about the “bullying” of Nancy Griesemer.
Mr. Schaeffer has not been alone in his criticism of the “arbitrary” and unfair eligibility of the National Merit Scholarship. In 2005, the University of California announced that it would no longer use the National Merit Scholarship program because it uses a single test score (the Junior year PSAT) for eligibility. In the fall I blogged about the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin says NO to National Merit)as it announced it would no longer give scholarships for National Merit Scholars. “Recently, a panel of experts on standardized testing convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling called on the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to stop using PSAT cutoff scores to determine eligibility for its awards”.
Obviously it is clear what I think about this: scores one can find online are not “copyrightable”. If you called National Merit and asked what the cut off score was for Texas they would tell you the number! How is that copyrightable? National Merit has come in for its share of criticism, and I believe this incident will only fuel the fire.
All quotations in this blog are from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
