FERPA (Academic Privacy) Question

college_ruled
Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:08:14 +0000

A major difference between high school in college is that often there is no grade to calculate week to week. In some classes the entire grade can be determined from one or two major assignments, so there is no weekly update to even report. (And not all professors take attendance).

I had to ask my professors to fill out a form with my midterm grades… once.

Thankfully, they all filled out my form (with varying degrees of reluctance), but none of them that semester had any clue what my grade was before I explicitly asked them. I am under the impression that while some of them kept a “running tally” of my grades on major assignments, most of them did not actually calculate the grades until the end of the term. It was bad enough asking once… I couldn’t imagine asking once a week.

Does the college use a “course management system” like Blackboard? Blackboard has an online grade book, which a few (but not many) of my professors have kept updated throughout the course. I guess the trick would be to find out which professors (if any) use an online gradebook…