Graderoom, a service used by over 1500 current Bellarmine students was blocked by Bellarmine's IT team just a few days ago. This grade visualization software provides invaluable tools to students that allow them to better calculate their grades and understand the impact of each individual assignment in each of their classes.

Bellarmine's IT team blocked the service, citing security concerns with its authentication system, worried that passwords could be compromised if the database experienced any sort of breach. This is not in fact possible, as Graderoom uses password hashing standards that don't allow for the decryption of account passwords and encrypts user's sensitive information using those encrypted passwords. This means that for a hacker to be able to access user's sensitive information, they would first need to figure out someone's unencrypted account password, which is protected using encryption algorithms that are impossible to reverse, and then gain unauthorized access to the production database to use that unencrypted password to decrypt the user's data.

If Graderoom is to remain blocked, students will no longer have access to these powerful tools that they have used to excel in their classes and will instead be forced to return to the school's grade management software which lacks the powerful tools that Graderoom offers. Especially as the year comes to an end, grades are more important than ever and if this block is to continue then students left at a disadvantage as they are unable to access these valuable grade visualization and calculation tools.