A class join code isn't working

A join code is six characters: letters and digits, never the easily-confused ones (no 0, O, 1, I or L). Capitalisation doesn’t matter. When a student enters one and sees “No class with that code in your school”, it’s almost always one of the causes below, in roughly this order.

The usual causes

• The student’s account is in a different workspace. This is the big one. A join code only finds classes in the workspace the student’s account belongs to. Student accounts are created by a teacher’s invitation, so a student invited by Ms Chen can join Ms Chen’s classes with a code, but not Mr Okafor’s, if he runs a separate workspace, even at the same school. The fix: the other teacher invites the student to their workspace first (schools on the School plan share one workspace, which is why this problem disappears there).
• The code was regenerated. Teachers can regenerate a class’s join code at any time, and the old one stops working immediately. If the code came from last term’s slide deck, check the class page for the current one.
• The class is archived. Codes only match active classes. An archived class rejects its own code until it’s restored.
• A simple typo. Rare, because ambiguous characters are excluded from codes, but a missed character still fails. Spaces around the code are ignored, so copy-paste of the code itself is safe.
• Signed in with the wrong account. Joining by code is a student action. A teacher trying a code from their own account won’t get in. Enrol yourself from the class page instead if you want to see the student view.

The two-minute fix for teachers

Open the class, read the current join code from the class page, and have the student enter it while signed in to the account you invited. If they’ve never signed in at all, they don’t need a code yet. They need their invitation link; the code comes after the account exists.