Comment by crazygringo
3 hours ago
I already said it's not about common sense, it's about legal risk.
It's about edge cases like someone set up your email to forward all your emails to their account without you knowing. Or other additional situations you could imagine.
There is no benefit to not emailing grades directly, from the perspective of Instructure. There is no ulterior motive here. But universities are genuinely risk-averse and their lawyers tell them that not including the grade in the email simply shuts down one more avenue for some potential lawsuit. Which costs money to defend even if a university wins it.
This isn't some kind of "dodge". This is literally just Instructure doing what university lawyers demand.
I agree with you that the email address is generally always also controlled by the school and has the same login authentication. It doesn't matter. I told you this isn't about common sense. This is about lawyers saying that it could reduce legal risk. And that is a true thing that is coming from real lawyers. Even if you disagree with those lawyers.
And Instructure isn't going to try to disagree with lawyers for its own potential customers. It's going to give the schools what they want, which is not revealing grades via email.
It's not a "dodge."
Then the lawyers are incompetent morons. There's "no benefit" to telling the student their own grade at all when viewed from that perspective. You could just not give them any feedback. Or you could allow them to consent to it, which is what the law asks.
It is a dodge. Society should not just say "oh those silly lawyers". These people are not being responsible. They are not doing their jobs.
No, the lawyers are not "incompetent morons", and I highly doubt you have the legal training and domain experience to be qualified to make that assertion.
You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees.
The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think. I've been in some of these conversations. Quite frankly, you don't know what you're talking about.
> You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. [¶] The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think.
The law is a lot like an app: It has to take into account a gazillion edge cases and corner cases — not to mention that people can be ignorant and/or malicious. It really is complicated, as you say above.
Well done on not hurling insults at @ndriscoll, BTW. Personal attacks don't persuade the target, and they can turn off onlookers who might be undecided. (Competent lawyers learn early that judges and jurors don't like personal attacks and can be less inclined to believe the attacker.)
The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society. This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse. And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law, and are they interpreting it in line with that purpose?" The details don't matter; the outcomes do. Their job is to deal with the details to reach the desired outcomes. If society is better off for putting them on a boat and sending them into the middle of the ocean, then they are incompetent.
Refusing to give a student their own data because of a privacy law that's meant to give the student control over their data is them failing. Full stop. There's no room for excuses for government funded entities to act in the exact opposite way that they are supposed to to avoid their fear of government imposed penalties from a deliberate misinterpretation of what the entire thing is about. That's incompetence by everyone involved. It is people going out of their way to make the world a worse place to act important. Absolutely unacceptable.
It's like if teachers aren't teaching the kids to read or add, the details about all the compliance stuff they need to worry about and how the school "can't" remove disruptive kids from a class or whatever is missing the point; the schools can't sacrifice actually doing their job at the alter of compliance, or we should just shut them down since all they do is waste resources. The compliance people should be figuring out how to shield the actual workers/create plausible deniability if the law is supposedly that stupid.
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