Wharton Computing Student Support

Creating A Wharton Password

SPIKE's  My Account tab will take you to the My Account section of SPIKE, where you can change your account password, along with other account management options.

The hardest part of changing your password is finding a password that meets all the requirements. The following "Password Guidelines" and "Tips for Creating a Password" should provide some assistance.

Password Guidelines

Your Wharton password must meet a fairly strict set of guidelines and complexity requirements.

Your Wharton password must:

• Be between 9 and 15 characters long.
• Include at least one numeric character (the digits 0 - 9).

Your Wharton password may:

• Include some — but not all — special characters (characters other than letters and numbers).

  For example, your password may include the following special characters:  - _  +

  Your password cannot include the following special characters: $ * | @ # % & { [ ( , " ` ' ~ or a blank space.

Your Wharton password must not:

• Be composed of all numbers or numbers and decimal points, plus signs, or minus signs.

  For example, 1-215-555-1212 is not a valid password.
   

• Be derived directly from words or phrases.

  For example, time2go, big$deal, ivyLeague, 2morrow, money$, and Ivyleague are not valid passwords.
   

• Contain your PennNet ID, username, or your first, middle, or last name.
• Consist of all uppercase or all lowercase characters.

  For example, ivyleague, IVYLEAGUE, and jlkasdf are not valid passwords.
   

• Include the special characters $ * | @ # % & { [ ( , " ` ' ~ or a blank space.

Given all these constraints, it may seem like it's impossible to create a valid password. But it's not — see the  tips below for ideas on how to find a password that's easy to remember and still meets the guidelines listed above.

Tips for Creating a Password

Your password should contain uppercase and lowercase letters and include at least one number or valid special character.

Ideally, your password should be easy for you to remember while appearing to be unintelligible to anyone else.

• Do not base your password on your personal information such as your birthday, phone number, address, and so on.
• Do not merely use a single word for your password. Some University systems check your password against lists of both English and foreign words and will reject a password that is a single word.

How can you create a simple password that works? Here are two techniques.

• Create a password that is two short words separated by a number. Make sure that each word is a blend of upper and lower case characters. Also if the word is a dictionary word, please make sure that it is less than 4 characters in length.

  For example, red66Blu6, Top007Cat, hoT369Dog, grt99Tmes, baD333Dayz are passwords created using this technique.

  While the specific examples used here are disallowed, similar passwords creating using this technique are easy to remember and meet all the requirements of the University systems.
   

• Another good technique to create a password is to think of a sentence that you can easily remember and use the first letter of each word to create your password.

  For example, the sentence "Skydiving is fun , but it is too dangerous" becomes. . . SiFBii2D.

  The sentence is easy to remember, but is difficult to guess.

  By capitalizing several letters, replacing the "," with a "-", and changing the word "too" to the number "2" the password meets the complexity guidelines.

Challenge Response Password Reset Option

Wharton's "challenge-response" system verifies your identity and allow you to reset your password online if you forget it.

To reset your password online, you will need to choose a series of security questions ahead of time. The answers to these questions, and others based on your individual student records, will be used to identify you should you forget your password.

For more information on the new challenge response application and how to set up password questions, please see: https://apps.wharton.upenn.edu/accounts/challengeresponse/