The academic records of 7,854 high-school students have been lost due to a hard-drive failure, the Ministry of Education said yesterday.
The records were being stored at National Chi Nan University, which was commissioned by the ministry’s K-12 Education Administration to host a computer server of student portfolios that universities could access to evaluate their applications.
Under a program introduced in 2019 for high-school students starting that year, students are to create portfolios to be used for university applications, which include their grades, extracurricular activities and other information related to their character and achievements.
Photo: Rachel Lin, Taipei Times
System administrators discovered that files were missing when rebooting the system, the ministry said, adding that 25,210 files for 7,854 students from 81 schools were lost.
On Sept. 5, the university began moving the files into a centralized system to meet government information-security regulations, which require bottom-up management of protected information, the ministry said.
“The files were moved to a virtual machine in the university’s new server room. On Wednesday, the system had to be restarted due to an update, which is when the problem was discovered,” it said.
K-12 Education Administration official Chang Yung-chieh (張永傑) said the issue appears to have affected only students who uploaded their information to the system between Sept. 5 and Wednesday.
Information uploaded prior to Sept. 5 has been backed up, he added.
The administration had already contacted the system’s software developer for assistance with file recovery, he said, adding that the developer had also contacted the affected students’ schools to inform them.
Students with their own copies of the missing files should re-upload them as soon as possible, he said.
“We have already checked all of the systems to ensure there are no more errors in the settings that would cause a repeat of the incident,” he said. “We are also requiring that the system be monitored by two different people every day, as a preventive measure.”
The administration would also require backup files to be maintained and stored in the university’s server room, as well as at an offsite location, he said.
“We are deeply sorry to the students and teachers affected, and will make the students’ rights and interests our top priority in handling the matter,” he said.
National Senior High School Teachers’ Union chairman Kao Meng-lin (高孟琳) said the incident would harm the public’s impression of the new portfolio system, adding that the issue must be treated seriously.
Parents should not panic, as students can still submit preliminary documents for their university applications, and provide other portfolio documents later when they are recovered, Kao said.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS