Student username convention

[EBrooke]

Hi everyone,

 

We're kicking off a project to review our IT naming conventions, so I wanted to find out what convention other institutions use for their student's AD usernames.

 

Currently we use the format: [First three letters of first name][First three letters of surname][Year of entry (YY)]. For example, John Smith enrolled in 2023 so his username is JohSmi23. If we also have a student "Johnny Smidt" enrolling in 2023, his username would then be JohSmi231.

 

We've been using this format for quite a few years but due to the way we're joining the names together we're sometimes ending up with usernames that we're having to change. Imagine, for example, Fatima Cowell.

 

I know some institutions use their unique student IDs for student logon names but ours are 12 characters long so I don't want to use that.

 

Very interested to hear your thoughts and any suggestions.

 

Best regards,

Edan

[Aprice]

I have always preferred 4 digit admission numbers, surprisingly everywhere we have rolled this one out for the most part the kids get used to it fairly quickly and generally don't forget the username.

 

The current site I'm at uses 18jsmith, which is fine until really long names or very common names occur. Also getting the kids to speak up so you can actually hear their names can be quite challenging. Getting a 4 digit numbers often much easier than dealing with pronunciation of some of the more challenging names.

[ThomL]

In my current and previous school we use/used a very similar format to you:

[Year of entry (YY)][First three letters of first name][First three letters of surname]

 

With your duplication example we would have 23johsmi & 23johsmi2

 

Never had to update a username because of the other example you gave - even with some 'funny' usernames over the years there wasn't a problem.

 

Not very useful i guess, but I thought I'd share - gives you 2 more schools as reference

[3s-gtech]

We use a system of completely generic noun and incremental number, each year group has that word as the suffix. They learn them quickly, but the logon contains no part of their name, age etc.

 

So: mustard123 for example.

 

(hmmm, could work through the condiments as the next lot…)

 

Incidentally, it’s the same system that we used when I started as a pupil multiple decades back! Never seen a reason to change it as it works really well.

[Guest Guest]

We use firstname.surname

 

Clashes have never been an issue for us but we only have 190 kids

[Jaan]

we do this:

 

[jthompson]

we do this:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]70249[/ATTACH]

 

Almost the same here, but we add the final two digits of their admission number to the end as well. We'd have had a few name clashes in recent years without those extra digits. Two J Smiths being enrolled at the same time would become 23SmithJ54 and 23SmithJ55, for instance. If another J Smith joined that cohort later and happened to end up with an admission number ending in 54 or 55, then we'd just pick some different digits to use at random instead.

 

The extra digits also help to prevent anyone 'guessing' at email addresses, since they're essentially arbitrary. Staff therefore have to use the directory and are less likely to make addressing errors.

[Rob_D]

we do [cohort intake year][first initial][surname] so 23jsmith. There's rumblings about changing it to use cohort leaving year as this is used more often elsewhere in the school.

 

In the time I've been here we've only had one full-on duplicate name (as in 2 J Smiths in the same year), but we normally have 1-2 name is too long for a username students per cohort.

[DalekSec]

[Year][Lastname][First3LettersofFirstname]

 

That way can very quickly see what year they are in!

[jthompson]

For surnames we remove any spaces and truncate it to 12 characters.

[msi_school]

I have generally used Year of entry, Initial, Surname truncated to 10 chars and all spaces, hyphens et. stripped out, add a number for a collision so your example would be 23JSmith and 23JSmith1 Generally this works well and has only been an issue for me when we had 2 John Peter Smiths in a year neither of whom could remember their password, which prompted us to get students to write their usernames on the front of their diaries because staff struggled with the collision when doing password resets and gave them access to the wrong account.

 

If given the choice I would use an admission number possibly prefixed with a year of entry this removes any collision issues and also removes complications when a student changes their name however I don't know how well this would work with some of the third party software and sites we use. This is harder to remember than your name but could be written/printed on a dairy id card etc.

Edited November 7, 2023 by msi_school

[TechMonkey]

We do similar to most. Year they will be or were Y7, first 5 of surname, first 2 of first name. No spaces.

 

Only had 2 duplicates due to very unimaginative parents who named their twins very similar names.

Means we can organise by year groups, no username is too long, we can programatically get usernames from a list and the staff and pupils can work them out for themselves. Considering when I joined they were using the same system as staff (initial and surname) and the number of clashes were ridiculous it is much better.

[mp4-dave]

We use year of entry + three digit number + surname + first name initial.

So John Aardvark is 23001AardvarkJ, works really well to make it obvious which accounts are students as opposed to staff. It also completely avoids duplicates as every student has a unique number.

[jthompson]

Whatever you choose, I'd recommend scanning through any list of new usernames with human eyeballs, just to pick out any unfortunate P00, etc. that might need a bit of tweaking before being distributed.

[Jaan]

The good old viral Megan Finger username

[mavhc]

Depends how large the school is, small: JohnS, large: 23JohnS, very large: 23JohnS3

 

I'd rather use mostly first names as their surnames keep changing anyway

[MartinT]

We are going to change starting next summer to 24JSmith style student usernames and e-mail addresses in order to give a clearer differentiation from staff usernames.

 

This is to avoid the GDPR issues with misdirected messages intended for staff going to students. Because teachers are in a hurry and don't eyeball the recipients properly.

[Oaktech]

We've moved to year-of-entry-initials. Basically the kids at primary cannot type anything more than that accurately.

 

23JS1 for John Smith

23JS2 for Joanna Smith

 

etc.

[StephenPink]

At the junior/secondary schools for staff its [ForenameInitial][surname] and if there's a clash it becomes [ForenameInitial][NextForenameCharacter][surname]

Students is similar [ForenameInitial][surname][intakeYear] and same logic for clash.

 

All handled by Salamander.

 

The sixth form college is different - staff is roughly the same, but students is just their student number. That was implemented before by time, not sure if it will change inline with the schools or not - there are 4000 students roughly so more likely to have clashes, and as others have said avoids staff accidents.

 

Cheers

[Rob_D]

I'd rather use mostly first names as their surnames keep changing anyway

Last couple of years we've had more forename changes than surname changes.

[MartinT]

We have forename changes with students and surname changes with staff. The latter cause far more headaches with 365.

[Davit2005]

When I did work in a secondary it was intake year (the year of the students entry to year 7 even if they arrived after that date we still gave them the intake year they would of had) the an initial and surname. Most of the time that was OK II don't think their were any duplicates.

 

I'd strongly suggest not using firstname.surname or surname.firstname in student email addresses for many reasons.

[Davit2005]

We have forename changes with students and surname changes with staff. The latter cause far more headaches with 365.

 

Yep same at previous place, (HR systems??) frequently getting spelling wrong. Was a b*** ache to sort staff, some changes had to be made to SQL tables which only 2 of us could/would do. They did have on site Exchange at the time for staff only so at least did not have to deal with O365 for them :-)

[mavhc]

When I did work in a secondary it was intake year (the year of the students entry to year 7 even if they arrived after that date we still gave them the intake year they would of had) the an initial and surname. Most of the time that was OK II don't think their were any duplicates.

 

I'd strongly suggest not using firstname.surname or surname.firstname in student email addresses for many reasons.

 

What are those reasons?

[jmak]

What are those reasons?

From previous threads on here over many years, it's to do with safeguarding. The argument is that it can make students vulnerable because it gives away their name, where they go to school and how old they are.

 

My counter argument was that we spend a lot of time trying to teach them (and staff) to only open or reply to emails when they're certain it's from someone they know. I always used to have controls so that younger children couldn't send external emails and am of the view that when older pupils are using email to contact people external to the school, it is useful for their email to be identifiable as a genuine pupil from your school. It might be worth avoiding use of year of entry.

 

I also think it's worth remembering that almost all of them have an online presence anyway where most of them go to great lengths to make themselves identifiable. My view is that it's more useful to teach them about being careful with sharing their personal information.

 

It should be a safeguarding decision rather than an IT one. As IT support, at just need to go with the safeguarding lead's decision.