Dive Brief:
- Attorney Marc J. Weinstein defends Pearson Education and its social media surveillance in a column picked up by eSchool News, arguing that the actions taken by the testing company have been re-framed as a student privacy issue when they are in fact not.
- Weinstein contends that the monitoring of PARCC test questions on social media is critical now that the exam is given in 11 states and Washington, D.C. as the multiple time zones and test dates makes cheating easier. He also argues that any reposting of test questions constitutes as copyright infringement.
- Pearson received flack earlier this month after word got out that it had been scouring social media to see if students had been posting about the PARCC exam it created.
Dive Insight:
Weinstein says "The phrase spying on kids may have emotional appeal, but it improperly suggests that those posting exam content online deserve privacy protection." In his opinion students post their thoughts to the world on social media and therefore its erroneous to assume certain privacies come with that forum.
This seems like a bit of a jump to think students intend to have big corporations looking at their tweets and social media. That said, the exam's many users does make it easier to pass test questions along to others. He's right that reposting of questions could invalidate the test.