The Office of Institutional Research (IR) has a wide variety of datasets at its disposal. Most of this data is actually owned by other offices and contains highly confidential and sensitive information. There is also considerable time and effort involved in preparing datasets for external analysis. Therefore, Institutional Research will not release any unit-record data beyond that which is considered public and/or posted on the IR web server (http://peacock.adm.oberlin.edu/ir.html ) except under very specific conditions. Normally, all identifiers will be stripped thereby mainting the confidentiality of the data. The specific conditions are:

1. Requests by trustee members, senior administrators and faculty representatives of standing committees for decision-support, institutional planning and exploratory analysis, upon approval by supervisors of IR

2. Requests by faculty members for use in classroom exercises

3. Requests by recognized researchers for scholarly work upon approval by supervisors of IR

Datasets will not be released to any other parties. Those requiring general information, or who have questions about this policy are encouraged to speak with the Director of Institutional Research. Unfortunately, IR cannot release datasets directly to students for classroom use or research purposes.

Ross Peacock

Director of Institutional Research