Colleagues in the HE/FE Sector,
If an exam candidate submits a Data Subject Access request
in the proper way, requiring sight of her/his examination
script(s), and the institution believes that it is right to
accede for the sake of transparency and because the
institution has no saucy examiners' comments to hide and
does not wish to find clever ways to frustrate a genuine
seeker after knowledge; but it costs the institution, say,
£50.00 to comply, since extra staff have to be hired to
unearth the scripts from the depths of the warehouse where
these are stored, after marking, etc, each November, how
may the institution recoup the cost?
A fee of £10.00 can be charged. Are any other incidental
expenses chargeable? And, if so, how may these be
calculated? Can the measure of 'disproportionate effort'
be in some way a function of the extra expense demanded by
compliance? And at what point in totting up the likely
cost of compliance can an institution say: 'Enough is
enough. We cannot afford to comply, even though we actually
want to.'
Is an institution in that position simply hoist with its
own highmindedness? Presumably, if an institution knows
beyond a legal peraventure that it has no personal data in
the form of marks or comments on a given examination
script, it can charge what it likes to retrieve that script
(being exempt from the Data Protection Act under Schedule
7/9) if, after being assured that no personal data can be
'communicated' from that source, the candidate persists in
requesting 'access' (sight of the script) and refuses to
accept those assurances.
Stephen Harrow
Data Protection Secretariat
King's College London
020 7848 3401
1 May 2001
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