A student number is the identification number assigned to a student upon first entering or registering with an educational institution and is used to identify the student in lieu of a name for grades, essays, projects, exams and official documents.
Contents |
At Austrian public universities, students are assigned a unique seven-digit ID number known as Matrikelnummer when they enrol in any course of studies for the first time. A student retains his or her number when he or she enrolls in a different subject or switches the university altogether. Even when someone is not enrolled in any study program for many years, he or she retains it.
The Matrikelnummer has the following format:
| Format: YYUXXXX | Explanation | Example: 9450234 |
|---|---|---|
| YY | Academic Year when the number was issued | The two digits refers to the academic year, here 1994/95. Students enrolling in Winter 1994/95 and Summer 1995 were assigned numbers beginning with 94. |
| U | One-digit code representing the university issuing the number | E.g. 0=University of Vienna, 5=Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Some universities share a particular number for this digit. |
| XXXX | individual number issued in the order of enrollment | In the example, the student holding the number was the 234th student enrolling at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in the academic year of 1994/95. |
HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, assigns a unique number to students. Many universities have their own system of student numbering.
All students are assigned a University Student Number (USN), e.g. 200112345 [1].
All students and staff are also issued with a CRSID, which consists of their initials, plus a number representing when they were assigned their CRSID in relation to others with similar initials. Older CRSIDs were five characters long, which was extended to seven briefly in the early 1990s, and later reduced to five again. The digit 1 is rarely used, except for Fellows or other high-ranking academic members of staff. For example, the first Alfred Brown Cockfoster is liable to be assigned abc20, while if next year Anna Budgens Cheapmoost comes along, she will become abc22 at the least, and quite possibly abc30, or similar. This system can accommodate up to 4 initials followed by one number, however, if a member has 5 (or more) initials, their initials are usually followed by a single number to give a 6 character (or more) long CRSID, e.g. abcde2, and so on. An example of the older, longer CRSID is abc1001.
All students and staff of the University and Colleges are also eligible [2] to receive or apply for a University Card[3], which has a barcode and associated code of capital letters and numbers on the back which identifies the holder, e.g. AB3CD, as well as another code consisting of lower-case letters and numbers, e.g. ab1006w/ 01.