Classes & Analytics
TeachFORGE.ai
Classes & Analytics / ID patterns
Student ID patterns
Make the platform's handles the same IDs your school already uses.
Use the IDs they already have. It saves a term of confusion.
What a pattern is
A pattern is a grammar for handles: a sequence of segments, each one letters, digits or a separator. Something like two letters, a hyphen, five digits produces handles such as XR-48291.
The pieces available: between one and twelve segments, each of one to twenty characters; letters upper case, lower case or mixed; separators of hyphen, underscore or full stop; and a maximum of forty characters overall.
The class creation page shows the chosen pattern's summary and an example, so you can check the shape against a real ID before committing to it.
Teachers pick, administrators define
You do not create patterns. You choose from the ones available, and if the one you need is not there the page tells you what to do: contact support so an administrator can add it.
An organisation can have a mandatory default. When it does, the class form locks to it and says so — this pattern is required, and there is no other choice for this organisation. That is how a school keeps every teacher's classes using the same IDs.
Sort this out before the first class rather than after. Handles are unique within their scope and classes are built on them, so changing the shape later means new handles, new slips and learner records that do not join up.
Random IDs
The alternative is Randomly generated IDs (not school IDs), which produces handles like horse-5252. The form warns clearly that they will not match your school's IDs, and asks you to tick that you understand before it will proceed.
Random is right when there is no institutional ID to match — a tutoring group, a club, a one-off workshop. It is wrong in a school that has IDs, because you will spend the year translating between two systems.
Pasting a real roster
With a pattern chosen, the class form takes Student IDs (one per line). Each line must match the pattern, and the field shows the summary and an example to paste against.
If any line is wrong, nothing is saved and you get a list: Line 4 (XR-482): does not match the selected pattern. The reasons it gives are the ones that actually happen — does not match, is empty, appears more than once in this list, is already used for another student, is already enrolled in this class, or exceeds the 200-student limit for one paste.
All-or-nothing is deliberate. A partial import leaves you unsure which half went in.