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Grades, Posting (May 2010 School Leader Update)

The federal office that enforces FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) is FPCO, the Family Policy Compliance Office. The director of FPCO sent a letter to a college* that had asked about posting grades by student ID (in this case, the college used the last 4 digits of the students' SSNs). A full copy of the letter appears at: http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/library/hunter.html. While posting under the last 4 digits of the students' SSNs was not approved, the letter goes on to state:

We note that FERPA does not prevent an educational agency or institution from posting the grades of students without written consent when it is not done in a personally identifiable manner. Thus, while FERPA precludes a school from posting grades by social security numbers, student ID numbers, or by names because these types of information are personally identifiable or easily traceable to the students, nothing in FERPA would preclude a school from assigning individual numbers to students for the purpose of posting grades as long as those numbers are known only to the student and the school officials who assigned them. [Emphasis added.]

Thus, test scores and grades may be posted if the identifier used by the school is known only to the student and teacher. (Having a teacher try to keep track of these identifiers may be more trouble than it's worth, but such a system is possible.)

As for having students grade each others' tests, this is allowable. You may recall that the United States Supreme Court did not ban this practice (but the Court made it clear that it did not like this idea) because the grades on those papers are not an "education record" until the grades are recorded in the teacher's grade book. That case is Falvo v. Owasso Indep. School District No. I-011, 534 US 426, 122 SCt 934 (2002).

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*Postsecondary institutions are also subject to FERPA and governed by FPCO. Therefore, the advice letter is equally applicable to K-12 schools.