Unique Student/Host ID's?

Amber Buehlmaier

Our school assigns a Student/Host ID and each student and parent needs to have a unique one. Aside from creating a spreadsheet and manually checking every single ID to make sure no duplicates are formed, has anyone found a better solution? BB does not auto-recognize duplicate Student/Host ID's and this is a few hours of my life I would love to get back.

Kirstin McDonald

Hi Amber,

I feel your pain. I use an Access database that autogenerates the ID (using part of their last name and a sequence of numbers that indicate each unique family and the sibling position within the family). The same database looks for duplicates from previously issued IDs so it will not duplicate.

Part of me just wants to reissue Student IDs based on the UserID from BB, but the old ID is used with so many different online subscriptions that it feels too daunting.

If anyone else has a simpler solution I'd love to hear from them.

Kirstin

Vicky Lopuchowycz

It's funny you should mention this…years ago (2017) I created an idea so people could vote for flagging duplicate ID #s but only have 6 votes~ LOL!

It is VERY time consuming and frustrating when a duplicate is inadvertently entered. I must also add, that at this point there is a level of disappointment that BB hasn't implemented this since it was a feature in EE and is a pretty basic feature.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Hi, Amber. Three years ago, we switched away from using Student/Host ID (which has to be manually managed) to using the User ID which is automatically assigned by Core and is enforced to be unique. Duplicates are physically not possible, and I no longer have to manage the numbers.

The change was less painful than I expected, and it really didn't affect much in the end. The Student/Host ID was mainly used as a field to match integrated data coming/going to other databases or systems at our school. The change over typically involved updating the number in the other system from the Student/Host ID to the User ID and then mapping the User ID as the default for any new records. Fortunately, most of this work could be done with bulk .CSV export/import but every system was slightly different in how we needed to get the numbers updated.

Kathy Hannon

It is painful! We started using UserID for Student ID 3 years ago (because of the duplication issue), last year we aligned all our 3rd party databases with the changing the student id's to Cores User/Student ID - many of the companys just simply took our .csv to change Student ID in their programs. It is making uploading new students and changes to returning student SO MUCH easier that I wish we had done this sooner. All our databases now constitent with the same numbers.

Kirstin McDonald

I think I'm going to copy Geoffrey and Kathy's plan of action and start moving everyone to UserID.

John Ronan

I wish I had voted for the idea in the first place. Didn't see it, I think

The shortcoming with the user_id approach is that you don't have a chance to embed any “meaning” into the student IDs, since BB chooses them.

I'm sure this is very common, but since our school's inception, we've adopted a very useful 6-digit scheme that a la yypnnn where “yy” is the grad year “23”; “p” is a single digit that indicates the academic program, and “nnn” is an ordinal number .

e.g. someone with the number “253066”, would can easily be interpreted by folks as “a class of 25 student in our special ed program;"

[the “066” is simply a number that enforces uniqueness within the “253…”

I dunno. This seems like an easy implementation for BB, although they would need to make it optional to protect legacy systems. [backwards compatibility]