| I'm an Instructor: Why am I having trouble adding a student employee to the WebRoster viewing list for my course? | I'm a student employee: Why am I having trouble viewing my professor's course roster? |
The current Registrar policy is that only UCI employees (including students with a UCI employee ID) are allowed to view course rosters containing both student names and student ID numbers. When a student is known to be an employee, but WebRoster won't allow an instructor to add the student's name to the list of viewers, or WebRoster completely blocks the student's access, the most common reason is that the student's employee ID number was assigned to a different UCInetID.
This typically occurs when a graduate student applies to UCI for admission before obtaining a Social Security number (SSN). The Graduate Admissions Office then generates a special fake SSN for the student's record and passes it on the Registrar Office. But later on, after obtaining a valid SSN so they can become paid T.A.'s for the university, many students fail to tell the Registrar Office so the SSN can be updated in student records. Then when the student applies for an employee ID at another department, NACS checks for a SSN match in the student records to see if the student already has a valid UCInetID. If the student's original "fake" SSN is still in the student's record, NACS assumes it must represent a different student with the same name, so they create a new, second UCInetID for the applicant.
Thus, a student ends up with two UCInetID's: One UCInetID identifies the person as a student with a fake SSN who is not an employee. The other UCInetID, which the student may not even be aware of, identifies the person as a employee with a valid SSN who is not a student. When an instructor tries to add the "student" UCInetID, WebRoster balks and complains that this is not an employee UCInetID. Or if a student tries to access WebRoster and authenticates with his main student UCInetID, WebRoster tells him that non-employees cannot access WebRoster.
The easiest way to confirm the problem is to perform a UCI lookup on the student's name at: http://directory.uci.edu/. If a student has two UCInetID's, you will see two (assuming the name is sufficiently unique) almost identical name entries.
Alternatively, a student can send me (programmer Garr Updegraff, x4-7902, garru@uci.edu) his student number and his employee ID and I'll check our records to see if he is listed separately with two different UCInetID's.
The best solution is to consolidate the two UCInetID's into one. The student should contact Sandra Webster (x4-7901, sewebste@uci.edu) at the Registrar Office and then bring his Social Security card to the office in person or by fax (if the latter, be sure to also hand-write the SSN on the fax because the card's number is sometimes too faint to transmit very well). Sandra will update the student's Registrar record and have NACS dissolve the student's second, unused UCInetID. After one day, the NACS update will percolate back into the Registrar database and the single UCInetID will be listed as both a student and an employee. Then the instructor can add it to the WebRoster viewing list and the student will be able to log in and access the roster.