When grade passback fails after census
Census week hides weak integrations. Enrolments settle, assessment windows open, and suddenly a nightly grade passback that “worked in UAT” drops marks for a subset of students — often those who changed campus or course after soft launch.
What usually breaks
- Role mappings that treat sessional tutors differently from permanent staff
- Timezone assumptions when the LMS and the tool disagree on due dates
- Student identifiers that diverge after a merge of historical records
Checks before you open the tool
- Compare a sample of 20 enrolments across LMS, identity provider, and the assessment tool
- Submit and return a mark in each grade category you use (numeric, scale, incomplete)
- Confirm who owns retries when the overnight job fails — vendor, LMS admin, or application support
If you are mid-procurement, ask vendors to demonstrate failure recovery, not only the happy path. That single request has saved more programme time than any glossy integration brochure.