Student number

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.

Student ID number systems by country

Austria

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.

Croatia

Students in Croatia are assigned a Unique Master Academic Citizen Number (Croatian: Jedinstveni matični broj akademskog građana, abbreviated JMBAG) upon their first enrollment on a Croatian university. The JMBAG is a 10-digit code assigned using the following system:

• Digits 1-4 - uniquely identifiy the issuing institution using a number assigned by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports
• Digits 5-9 - denote a unique master number issued by the issuing institution (usually a number internally used on the college institution)
• Digit 10 - control digit

When a student is assigned a JMBAG number, he is also issued an Xica card by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports.

United Kingdom

HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, assigns a unique number to students. Many universities have their own system of student numbering.

University of Cambridge

All students are assigned a University Student Number (USN), e.g. 200112345 [1].

All students and staff are also issued with a Common Registration Service identifier (CRSid) by the University Computing Service, which is generated from the person's initials followed by one or more digits and is up to seven characters long: for example, spqr2.

Newly issued CRSids are at least five characters long, with between two and six initials followed by a number (increasing with each person sharing the given initials) of at least one digit, the first of which is not 1 in order to avoid confusion with the letter L. Earlier schemes used different rules to determine the number, and some early CRSids had no number.

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.