Securely Transferring Grades

Situation: Grades and Other Confidential Student Data

You're a graduate assistant with grades to submit, comments to return on students' papers, and an online quiz to give your class. You know the laws about student data confidentiality, and you want to make sure that students can see their own grades but can't see anyone else's. Also, your supervising professor wants to see your course materials, but doesn't need to see the students' grades at this point.

What you can do

CITES Educational Technologies' courseware offerings help students and teachers have a central online repository for class-related information, such as online class discussions, forums, tests, coursework, grades, and reference material. In the examples below, Illinois Compass is discussed, but the principles hold true for the other courseware as well.

1. Keep your data private while it's traveling from your computer to its destination

   In order to keep students' data private, Illinois Compass first asks each student and instructor to identify himself or herself by logging in to the system through the Bluestem interface, which uses the NetID and NetID password.
   
   The entire Illinois Compass system is SSL-encrypted, meaning that all data is kept secure and private from your computer to the Illinois Compass servers and back.

2. Make sure the destination is appropriately protected

   If you've identified yourself as an instructor of the course you're teaching, you'll have access to edit course materials and all students' grades, but if a student logs in, Illinois Compass restricts the student's access so that the only grades the student can see is his or her own.
   
   By default, grades are not visible to anyone but the instructor. If you want your students to be able to see their own grades for one quiz but not another, you can mark the grade column that the students should be allowed to see, and leave the other columns set to the usual hidden state.

3. Understand who has permission to see your data at the destination

   In order to make collaboration simple between instructors who teach different sections of the same course, it's easy for you to add your colleagues to the list of people allowed to view your course materials. It's also easy for you to add your colleagues to the list of people allowed to view your students' grades.

   However, think carefully before you add a colleague to the grade view. If they don't really need to see your students' results on a quiz, just the quiz itself, then it's better to give them permission to view course materials without viewing grades. (This is called an "auditor" permission set in Illinois Compass, which offers many different groups of permissions for different groups of users.)

   Additional information about how to use Illinois Compass and its teaching tools is available from CITES Educational Technologies, which also offers training courses for Illinois Compass and the other courseware packages available to campus instructors.