When students write exams, they want to know their score as fast as possible. However, the system that is supposed to deliver this information to the students is usually slow, for a lot of reasons that I will not go into. Where I work, it has become quite usual to publish a pdf on the course website that lists the student ID together with the number of points they scored. Since student IDs are usually anonymous, most people don't see it as a problem. However, the more this practice is used, the less anonymous a student ID actually is: Once there are enough of these lists public, this data might theoretically be used to connect a student to his or her student ID only by knowing which courses he or she attended. I propose a much better solution. I did not come up with this myself by the way, this is due to a brillian colleague of mine, but I still wanted to share it with the world. (more…)