Privacy Notice

Last updated: August 2026 · Back to the plain-language version

This is the learning platform for your psychology course. It explains what the site records while you use it, why, and who can see it. The short version: we record how you work so we can grade fairly, give useful feedback, and tell human writing apart from AI. We do not sell your data, and we only share it with the people and services needed to run your course.

What We Collect

• Account: your username and school email, used for signing in.
• Coursework: the responses, quiz answers, and flashcard results you submit.
• Progress: completion, scores, streaks, and activity timestamps.
• How you work on a response: to help tell human writing from AI, the site records how much you type versus paste, the pace and pauses of your writing, and how long you spend with the material. These are recorded as counts and timing only. It does not record the keys you press or watch what you type, and the only writing it keeps is the answer you submit.
• Writing style: from the answers you submit, the site measures broad style patterns, such as sentence length and vocabulary variety. This helps tell human writing from AI, sometimes by comparing a new answer with your own earlier work.
• Optional background information: if you choose to share demographic details during onboarding, your instructor uses them only to check that the course is serving every group of students fairly.

How It's Used

• To grade your work and track your progress.
• To give you feedback.
• To support academic integrity by telling human work from AI as fairly as we can.

A Note on Fairness

The information about how you work protects honest students too. If an AI-detection result is ever questioned, the record of how an answer was actually written, typed steadily over time in your own style, is often the clearest evidence that the work is yours. These signals are there to inform a human review by your instructor. They do not on their own change your grade or accuse you of anything.

Drafts in Your Browser

As you type an answer, a copy is saved in your own browser so you do not lose work if a page reloads. That draft stays on your device and is not sent anywhere until you submit.

Who Can See It

• You: your own work and progress.
• Your instructor: your submissions, grades, progress, and the integrity signals above.
• Course service providers: the services listed below receive only the data needed to run the course.
• No sale or advertising use: we do not sell your data, use it for ads, or share it for unrelated purposes.

Improving the Platform

We measure how long student pages take to load so we can find and fix slow pages. These measurements contain the page type, site version, and timing numbers. They do not contain your name, answers, or page address. Measurements older than 30 days are removed during routine site maintenance.

We use combined, de-identified data from across all students to see how the course is working and to improve the learning experience for everyone. This is always about the group, never about singling out one person. Any demographic information you share is used only by your instructor to check that the course is serving every group of students fairly. None of this affects your grade, and none of it is shared outside your course.

Services We Rely On

• Automated feedback and grading (OpenAI, Anthropic, Together.ai, and DeepInfra): depending on the activity and service availability, your submitted text and the grading criteria are sent for automated review. Your psych.study name, student ID, and email address are not attached. None of these providers use text sent through their APIs to train their models. Retention varies by provider: some hold nothing at all, processing the request in memory and discarding it, and the others delete it after a short fixed window kept for abuse monitoring.
• AI detection (Pangram): submitted text is checked for AI-generated content without your psych.study account information attached. Pangram is a classifier rather than a writing model. It reads text and returns a score for how likely the text is to be AI-written; it does not generate text and cannot reproduce your writing. Pangram's published policy states that it does not train general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT, and that its detector is built on a proprietary dataset that "doesn't include user submitted content." Text sent to Pangram is stored while the account is active and can be deleted from that history, which removes it from their servers. Their policy is at pangram.com/data-privacy.
• Email (Mailgun): used to send verification codes where required.
• Message attachments (Cloudinary): images you choose to attach to a message are stored so your instructor can view them.
• Hosting (Render) and error monitoring (Sentry): keep the site running and help us fix problems; these may briefly record your account identifier in technical logs.

Data Retention and Deletion

Your data is kept while your course is active so the site can provide the course, calculate grades, and handle questions or appeals.

After your course ends, you may ask your instructor to permanently delete your psych.study account and the course data in the live site. This includes your submissions, grades, progress, writing-process data, messages, and message attachments. Backup copies age out through the hosting provider's normal backup rotation. Deleting psych.study data does not alter official records held separately by your college, such as records in Canvas.

Your FERPA Rights

FERPA gives eligible students rights concerning access to education records, requests to correct those records, and disclosure of personally identifiable information. For an official explanation, see the U.S. Department of Education's FERPA page. Your college's annual FERPA notice explains its local procedures.

Questions?

Contact your instructor directly with any privacy concerns.