Re: Displaying grades anonymously

[Dennis Roberts]

At 04:03 PM 1/18/03 -0600, Jerrold Zar wrote:

Publicly displaying student grades is against federal law if the grades
can be identified with particular students, hence he need for anonymity
in the display.

So, some instructors assign a numerical code to each student, or
perhaps use the last four digits of the students' Social Security
number.  Use of the entire SSN is discouraged because of other privacy
concerns.)  But, a caution is necessary here; if readers of the list of
numbers can make a good guess as the identity of any of the students,
the law has been broken and students could be embarrassed.  This can
happen if you list the students in alphabetical order, even without
their names.  For example:

but, the notion of having a random looking list with student #s ... that happens to be alphabetical ... seems a bit strange ... the only reason why alphabetizing or ... using numbers in order ... would be to make it simpler for a student to find his/her score ...

it is doubtful that having a list ordered with last 4 digits of a student number is going to offer any casual observer ... even a student in a class ... the ability to identify anyone ... of course, as i mentioned before ... sometimes students cluster at the list and readily point to their scores ... sometimes, i have had students come over and look up other students' scores ... because they were asked to ...

keeping scores secret is not the criterion ... it is making them unidentifiable to the casual observer ...

finally, i think it IS legal (though i would never do it) to actually list full ids IF all have given their consent (why they would do that however, i have no idea)

ps ... in very small classes, this is more of a problem ... in large classes ... this is NO problem

.
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