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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

How does HIPAA compare to FERPA?

My understanding is that FERPA is similar to HIPAA, except for college scores and enrollment information instead of medical records.

But there’s a rule in FERPA where you explicitly can’t leave a stack of exams and let students pick them, because it exposes students to others’ scores. Another rule is that you can’t associate a students exam with their student ID even if it’s a sequence of numbers, because the id is public information, but you wouldn’t expect someone to remember someone else’s id.

(I specifically remember some professors not following the exam rule, probably because they didn’t know or perhaps it didn’t exist yet. I don’t know if anything happened to them but I suspect if anything, they were simply asked to not do that in the future.)

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> because the id is public information, but you wouldn’t expect someone to remember someone else’s id.

In my college people definitely remembered other people's IDs, since all you needed to badge into any door they had access to was to write their ID and a 00+(number of replacement badges) to the data track on a swipe card. This gave access to even dorms. This even worked for faculty or Deans who had full access to all academic and athletic facilities.

Clearly nobody would ever know anybody else's public ID, because that would take just going into a study session and looking at the sign in sheet of hundreds of them sitting in the back of the classroom. Or looking at the log of swipes of an event that a dean attended.

I recently learnt on HN that some countries don't publish grades to ALL students at once and still can't think why. It's such an amazing gift to be able to see how much everyone got and the academic competition in its most pure form, while removing some awkwardness of getting results of your work (good or bad) early in your life.

People are too focused on hiding results because someone might feel bad.

Most classes. publish grade distributions, so you know if you were in the top or bottom 10%. Or at least the mean, median, highest, and lowest.

But you don’t get the grades of individuals.

While things like FERPA broadly protect most student information in the US, it doesn't exist so that people don't feel bad about their test scores. It limits schools and their staff to using student data for legitimate academic purposes and prohibits other uses that could be bad. That data goes beyond just test scores and could be things related to the students health, social life, behavior, etc. This kind of data doesn't need to shared with anyone that doesn't need to know it.

> you explicitly can’t leave a stack of exams and let students pick them, because it exposes students to others’ scores. Another rule is that you can’t associate a students exam with their student ID

As a comparison, at my Uni in the 1970s individual grades were posted along with corresponding social security numbers.

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