Privacy of grades
Arkansas State University has adopted rules concerning grade privacy and other issues that comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which Congress enacted in 1974. Students have access to their educational records, including nearly all the information the university maintains directly related to them. FERPA protects students' educational records (including paper and electronic data), and it prohibits everyone connected to the university, including faculty and administrators, from improperly disclosing student information. Educational records may be released without the student's permission when teachers or other school officials have a legitimate, educational need for them, when a judicial order or subpoena has been issued for them, or when they are needed to protect the health or safety of the student or other individuals.
Instructors should be careful in the manner they discuss or publish student grades. They should not publicly post grades or test scores with the students' names or social security numbers. The ASU Registrar does not recommend posting grades by a student identity code, since the code could be deciphered by others. FERPA forbids teachers to place graded student papers for retrieval outside their office doors or in other insecure areas. Teachers should not discuss grades over the phone, by e-mail, or over the Internet. (There are some exceptions to this rule: grades are, of course, transmitted and discussed online in Internet courses, and grades are posted on the ASU Web for Students). In most cases, a student's parents may not have access to his or her educational records; teachers should not discuss students' grades with the students' parents.
This webpage does not profess to be exhaustive in setting out ASU's grade privacy policies or the content of FERPA. Students who have questions on these issues should contact the Registrar.