How do I manually create accounts for students?

The following article lays out the different ways to add or import students to classes: How do I add a student to my class?

Classes with class codes are designed for a class of students to quickly sign up, themselves, under direction from their teacher using a class code. The process is not designed for teachers to manually sign up students. We understand that some teachers prefer to set up accounts for students though.

If you want to manually add students yourself, then you must:

1. Create a class manually
2. Copy the class code
3. Access a web browser where you are not logged into your teacher account:
   • To do this, you can log out of your teacher account. If you want to stay logged into your teacher account, you can open an incognito tab of the same browser, or open a new window in a different browser. 
4. From that browser, go to commonlit.org/code
5. Enter the class code
6. Sign up 1 student
7. Record their login info
8. Log out, and
9. Start again for the next student with the same code.

Since we designed this process to allow all students to sign up on their own with unique, secure passwords, it is tedious for teachers to manually add students themselves. The benefits include controlling the names, and therefore usernames, that students use to sign up. The drawbacks include the time spent by teachers on the process.

If you are trying to limit the student PII included on a student's account, please note: usernames are automatically generated by CommonLit (to ensure uniqueness) using the alphabetic characters in a student's name. We will not include any numbers from a student's name in their username. As such, if you sign a student up using their school ID as their name, you will not achieve the desired result of a username that contains the student's ID.

If you need additional support signing up students in a manner that limits the PII collected for them, please reach out to us at help@commonlit.org.