Registrar's Office Will Handle Procedures for Student Files

Dean Rosovsky's office yesterday released guidelines that place the brunt of responsibility for implementing the new student files law on the departments and the Registrar's Office.

The guidelines establish the Registrar's Office as the channel for student access to files, and require the Houses to send students' faculty recommendations and tutorial reports now in files back to the departments they came from.

Dean Whitlock said yesterday that specific guidelines for House files may be finished this week, but that they will be modeled on the departmental guidelines Rosovsky released yesterday.

'Horrendous' Task

Compliance with the files law is "a horrendous bureaucratic task" and departments will bear most of the workload, Whitlock said.

Once departments receive all the material they have put in students' files, they must either contact the authors of reports written under an assumption of confidentiality or send the reports back to their authors.

The departments will ask the authors what they would like done with their reports, encouraging them to let the material stay in the files.

After the bill goes into effect November 19, students can go to the registrar's office and ask to see their files.

The registrar's office will establish a courier system to collect the files material from departments and Houses, show the material to the students, and then return it to its original source.

If a student wants to challenge the accuracy of the material in his file, he must put his complaint in writing and submit it to the registrar's office, which will then pass it on to the Committee on Privacy, Accessibility and Security of Records for resolution.

Marion C. Belliveau, the Faculty's Registrar, said yesterday that her office will hire "two or three new people" to handle the administrative work of implementing the files law.

She said she will not let students make copies of their files but will let them read the files in the registrar's office.

Houses Keep Files

After Houses return some of the material in their files to departments, they will still retain students' transcripts, administrative board records and personal correspondence.

"The majority of the stuff in House files will stay there," Anthony T. Arlotto, senior tutor of Winthrop House, said yesterday. "I don't foresee any problems at all in sending things back to departments.