The “public” version of EdReady is designed for use by any student who is thinking about college, preparing for widely used placement exams (e.g., ACT® or SAT®), or perhaps already in a developmental (remedial) education program. The public version offers personalized recommendations and courses of study based on general expectations for any college and university in the United States.
The “institutional” versions of EdReady are essentially the same as the public version. However, each institutional version can be customized in a number of ways, including the possibility of targeted options and recommendations specific to that institution.
But perhaps the most important difference pertains to data access. You must be an authorized institutional affiliate for an institutional version in order to get access to any data or reporting from EdReady. The reason for this distinction is because of federal privacy laws, which bar us from sharing student data on the free site. The only way for us to legally grant access to student data is if students use a custom institutional site. In this case, it becomes the responsibility of institutional administrators to determine who is actually granted access to the resulting data. The tools for managing these access permissions and dealing with the resulting data are built in to the administrative features for custom, institutional sites.