Audit Log

Applies to both the Enterprise SIS and the free gradebook.

Sooner or later, every school asks some version of the same question: this grade was different last week — who changed it, and what was it before? The same question gets asked about a student who has disappeared from a class, an assignment that is no longer there, and an attendance mark nobody remembers entering.

In version 12, iGradePlus will be able to answer it. An audit log will record every change made to your data as it happens: what was changed, who changed it, when, and what the values were before and after.

Every change to a record will leave an entry behind:

A change to a record
    ├── What happened   ← added, changed, or deleted
    ├── Which record    ← the student, class, assignment, score…
    ├── Who did it      ← the person signed in at the time
    ├── When            ← the date and time of the change
    └── What changed    ← each value, before and after

Nobody will have to remember to write anything down. The log is kept by iGradePlus, as a consequence of the change itself.

That includes the changes that matter most after the fact. Locking, unlocking, and overriding a closed grading period — described in Locked Timelines and Grading Periods — will each be recorded here.

Three kinds of change

The audit log will record the three things that can happen to a record:

• Added — a record was created. The entry shows the values it was created with.
• Changed — an existing record was edited. The entry shows each value that changed, before and after.
• Deleted — a record was removed. The entry shows what the record held when it was deleted.

The name of the person who made the change is kept in the entry itself. If that staff member later changes their name or leaves the school, the entry still says who it was at the time.

Before and after

Knowing that a record changed is only half an answer. Opening an entry will show the change itself, value by value: what was added, what was removed, and for anything edited, the old value beside the new one.

That is the difference between “this student’s record was updated on Tuesday” and “on Tuesday the grade level was changed from 7 to 8.” The second is the one that ends the conversation.

Dates, statuses, and references to other records will be shown the way they appear everywhere else in iGradePlus, so an entry reads as a description of what happened rather than something to be decoded.

Finding the change you are looking for

A log of every change is only useful if the one you want can be found. The audit log will be something you can narrow down:

• By date — everything that changed in a given range.
• By person — everything a particular person changed.
• By kind of record — students, classes, assignments, and so on.
• By kind of change — additions, edits, or deletions.
• By searching — for a word or value that appears in the change itself.

These combine. Every student deleted in the last month is a question about a kind of record, a kind of change, and a date range, and it will have a direct answer.

History where the record lives

Often the question starts from the record rather than from the log: what has happened to this student, this class, this staff member? Records like these will carry their own history — the same entries, already narrowed to that one record and listed in order — so the answer is on the page you are already looking at.

Taking a copy with you

Whatever you have narrowed the log down to, you will be able to export as a spreadsheet file — for a records request, a review, or your own archive.

A record that stays as it was written

An audit log is only worth consulting if it can be trusted, so its entries will be permanent in a way the rest of your data is not. An entry cannot be edited, and a single entry cannot be removed — not by a teacher, and not by an administrator.

iGradePlus will also check the log against itself. The audit log page will show whether the log has been verified as intact, and if an entry has ever been altered or gone missing, it will say so and show where the record breaks.

How far back the log goes

Entries will not be kept forever. Each one will be kept for a set period and then removed, and that period will depend on which product you use. The audit log will tell you how far back it reaches, so there is never a question about whether an older change should still be there.

Who will see it

What you see in the audit log will follow what you are responsible for.

• Administrators in the Enterprise SIS who have been given the privilege will see the audit log for the schools they are assigned to — who changed what, across the classes and staff of those schools.
• Teachers in the Enterprise SIS will see the audit log for the data they manage, so a teacher can look into a change to their own classes without having to ask an administrator.
• Teachers on the free gradebook will see all of it. The gradebook is yours, and so is its log.

On the free gradebook, where you are the only person making changes, the log answers a slightly different question: what did I change, and when? When a grade is not what you remember entering, the log will show the change that was made and when it happened.

What this will mean for you

• If you are an administrator, a disputed grade or a missing record in one of your schools stops being a matter of recollection. You will be able to see what changed, who changed it, and what it was before.
• If you teach in the Enterprise SIS, you will be able to see the history of the data you manage for yourself. A change you did not make is shown as someone else’s, and a change you did make is shown as exactly what it was.
• If you teach on the free gradebook, you will have the full record of your gradebook’s changes to check against your memory, without having kept one yourself.
• If you answer to a district, a board, or an accreditor, you will be able to show the history of a record — and take a copy of it with you — rather than describe it.