The FERPA Risks Faculty Miss in Their Slides
FERPA covers more than grades. Student names in speaker notes, class photos, and grade distribution charts in slide decks can all be FERPA violations. Five patterns and fixes.
The Vellum Review Editorial Team
Published May 19, 20261 min read
Most faculty think of FERPA as the law that governs transcripts, grade rosters, and the registrar's office. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete in ways that create real exposure.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects any "education record" that contains personally identifiable information (PII) about a student at an institution receiving federal funding.1 The statute does not limit that protection to official administrative records. It applies to any record, in any format, that is maintained by the institution or by a school official acting in that capacity, and that could be used to identify a specific student.2
Lecture slides, course materials, and presentation decks fall squarely within that definition when they contain student-identifiable content. The problem is that faculty rarely think of slide decks as records subject to FERPA, and the ways student information ends up in slides are often inadvertent.
What follows are five common slip patterns, why each creates FERPA risk, and the straightforward fix for each.