Have you noticed how most of your teachers post grades up online this year? Did you just think it was because teachers were more efficient at posting grades? Although that could be one of the reasons, it is due to the fact thatgrades cannot be posted up in classrooms.
Why suddenly change a system that seemed to be working quite well for the past years? The answer to that, of course, involves the law. The US Department of Education proposed Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (simply known as FERPA), which as its name shows, states that parents and students have certain rights regarding educational privacy.
Did the school just randomly decide to look into the laws and see if they were following them? Not really. It was because a parent was wondering whether or not announcing GPAs in a sports banquet was right and they also asked whether posting grades up, even with I.D numbers was allowed. Turns out it wasn’t, therefore teachers are not allowed to post up grades in their classrooms nor are they allowed publicly announce students’ GPAs.
However, if teachers really do want to post grades up in class, they are allowed to issue I.D numbers that they come up with themselves, which only the student and teacher know. It cannot use the school issued I.D number.
Teachers and students alike have found it inconvenient that grades aren’t being posted up in classrooms.
Mr. Yarnton, Spanish teacher, says, “I like having grades posted up in the classroom because if students have any questions about their grades, they can come up to me ask me right away. Also, in regards to issues different I.D numbers, if every teacher did that students would have to remember five or six different numbers which can get confusing.”
“No one is supposed to know your ID number in the first place, so it is your fault if you are telling people and it should be that if parents don’t want their children’s grades to be posted, perhaps they should individually ask teachers to not post them rather than having it affect everyone,” says Kevin Nguyen (’13).
Students, teachers, and parents will have to learn to cope with this newly enforced, or re-enforced, rule because it is a law and the school cannot do much about it, no matter how inconvenient it may seem. On the plus side, at least our grades will be updated on the portal more often.
