ACE and your email address

[cookderosa]

I had a little hiccup with my #3 son's ACE account today. It's fixed now, but thought I'd share.

In 2011 my #1 son took many ACE courses that were put on his ACE transcript. He didn't have an email address, so we used mine. He graduated - fast forward.

I set up an ACE account for son #3 a few years ago. Son #3 was only in 7th grade at the time, and didn't have an email account, so I used mine. I created his own log in / account, and had no issues. He has been adding ACE courses since then without incident, until this week!

I added Medical Terminology (SL) and it came back denied because credit was already issued. Well, clearly that was a mistake, but as it turns out, when SL and ACE evaluate the credit, it's linked to an EMAIL ADDRESS, not name! So, when my #1 son took it 6 years ago under my email, it looked like it was duplicate.

ACE was awesome, walked me through changing #3's account email and resubmitting my request - but I was really suprised that they don't check anything other than email address?!? Can someone with a little more computer knowledge tell me if email addresses ever get recycled like phone numbers? I told the ACE agent that I didn't think it was a very good way to id someone- he told me email addresses are only ever used once. I'd never heard that..... Anyone else have issues with this?

[ndelco]

I could have sworn someone at Study.com told me ACE goes by SSN. I guess not.

[Drakemoore]

Have never taken ACE exams before but that's a very silly way to track someone and it sounds like it could be abused. I personally always thought everything related to college credits were based on your SSN, pretty sure even many industry certificates are based on your SSN for record keeping.

[Carnation]

I just signed up a son who is under 13yo so we had to call to set up the account.
They told us NOT to use his Social Security Number due to identity theft issues.
They told us that they go by name and birthdate.

The way they set up the account is they had us do the online account set up but used dh's birthdate then they manually just changed the birthdate to match our son.

At least you were able to get through to ACE to fix the issue.

[videogamesrock]

Have never taken ACE exams before but that's a very silly way to track someone and it sounds like it could be abused. I personally always thought everything related to college credits were based on your SSN, pretty sure even many industry certificates are based on your SSN for record keeping.

the SS# is optional. International students do t have a SS# and opt out and use a student number instead.

[clep3705]

In the digital millennium, not having an email address is a problem. Just because a child has an email address doesn't mean the child has to have access to it.

It's fairly common now for parents to open email accounts for children when they are born, much like how kids apply for Social Security numbers at birth. Once the child is at an age you the parent consider appropriate, you can give the child the email address and password.

When choosing a free email account for anybody, you want to pick a provider likely to stick around. That's why I recommend Gmail and Outlook.com. You also want something that sounds professional. That's why I don't recommend Hotmail or Yahoo.

I would not use a single email account for more than one person.

Web based email is pretty good these days, but having a good email client on a device offers certain advantages. If you configure Outlook or a free client such as Thunderbird or Opera email, you can access all of your email accounts in one place. This is important because it logs you in to each email account. If free email accounts are accessed periodically, they go away.

[topdog98]

Using email seems like a terrible method to ID someone. You were using two students with the same email address. It seems like a common problem would be where one person used two email addresses, one for ACE and a different one for Straighterline. These days it is very common to have more than one email address.

[bluebooger]

Excelsior wouldn't accept my ACE statistics.com courses because my birthdates didn't match

on ACE I had my birthdate listed as January 1 1901

on excelsior I had it listed as October 29 1929

so I changed the birth dates to be correct on both and resubmitted
and then everything was fine then

that's what I get for being a smartass

[cookderosa]

Well my son has had his own email for a several years, but like I said, initially it was set up under mine.

I'm still kinda confused about where the break down is- his ACE account and SL accounts all have his information (Name, SS#, address, birth date, or whatever else they asked) and his SL account has his email address. So, the only reason SL would deny the credit is because they used the email address linked to ACE, not the one on his account. It's very strange. The solution was to update his ACE email, but it doesn't have to match SL email, only that it couldn't match another SL user. <shaking head>

[davewill]

Sounds like it SL's problem. I'd guess that ACE sends them multiple identifying details, and SL kicked your request back because the email was ambiguous (matched multiple users). Odd that it didn't cause a similar problem with your own courses.