Plenty of graduate students dislike the research assignments handed to them by professors.
Ezra Whitman, a graduate student in the 2017 class at Portland State University, had a different problem with the homework he was given. He said it broke the law.
"I didn't want to do it, period," says Whitman. "It didn't meet research best practices in any aspect. [We were] illegally harvesting data."
The victims of this data breach? Kids in Portland Public Schools.
For two years, professors at PSU's Graduate School of Education conducted a research project using unwitting K-12 students as subjects. The university has since acknowledged it failed to inform parents of the research and did not get their permission to access the student data. University officials say they are still examining whether any laws were broken.
Read more at The Willamette Week: http://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2018/03/07/portland-state-university-researchers-may-have-violated-federal-law-by-using-the-personal-data-of-thousands-of-portland-area-k-12-students/