Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between Scholasticus (“we”, “us”, “our”) and you. They govern your use of the Scholasticus platform: the website you are reading, the console on the dash subdomain, the exam application served on an institution’s own subdomain, and the interfaces that connect them.

If you use the platform on behalf of an institution — a university, a school, a training provider, an employer — you confirm that you are authorised to accept these terms for it, and “you” means both you and that institution.

Two further documents form part of this agreement and are incorporated by reference: the Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out what the platform may and may not be used for, and the Privacy Policy, which describes what personal data the platform holds and why. Where this document and one of those conflict on a point of use or of data protection, the more specific document governs that point.

If you do not accept these terms, do not create an account and do not use the platform.

Scholasticus is not a company. It is a name a single person established in Denmark trades under, and there is no company, no partnership and no registered entity standing between you and that person. The party on the other side of this agreement is therefore an individual, personally liable under it. We would rather you read that here than discover it later.

Trading name

Scholasticus

Legal form

None. A private individual trading under the name above, with no separate legal personality and no limitation of liability

Established in

Denmark

Email

[email protected]

Identity

The operator’s name and postal address are not published on this site. They are given on request to anybody who needs them — to bring or answer a claim, or to serve a notice — and to any court or public authority that requires them

There is one person and no employees, and that is the whole of it. Where this agreement says “we”, it means that one person, together with the providers named in the Privacy Policy that run parts of the platform under contract. There is no company, no board, no other owner and nobody else with authority to act for us.

Being established in Denmark is what decides several things this document cannot decide for itself. Danish law governs this agreement, and Danish courts hear a dispute about it — section 17. Danish consumer and marketing rules apply to how the platform is sold, whatever a clause here says. And the authority that supervises our handling of personal data is Datatilsynet, named in the Privacy Policy.

Scholasticus is not registered for VAT and holds no VAT number, so no invoice comes from us and you will not receive a VAT invoice from us. That does not make a purchase untaxed — section 9 explains who invoices you and who accounts for the tax.

These words are used throughout with the meanings below.

Workspace

An institution’s own area of the platform: its own subdomain, its own member list, its own roles, and its own exams. Nothing is shared between two workspaces unless both agree to share it.

Member

An account that has been admitted to a workspace, with a role that decides what it may do there.

Candidate

A member who sits an exam. The same account can be a candidate in one workspace and an administrator in another.

Attempt

One candidate’s sitting of one exam, together with the answers submitted, the times recorded and the connection events observed while it was open.

Your content

Everything you or your members put into a workspace: exams and their questions, attachments, answers, grades, feedback, member lists and workspace settings.

The platform

The software and the hosted service described in section 1, including the documentation and any interface we provide for reaching it.

An account belongs to one person. Give accurate details when you create one, keep them current, and keep the credentials to yourself: anything done with your credentials is treated as done by you unless you have told us they were compromised.

Sign-in runs through the platform’s identity component. A workspace may require more than an email address before it admits an account — a student number, a cohort, an access code — and may require that the value be unique within that workspace. Those values are held encrypted and are visible to that workspace’s administrators only.

A sign-in creates a session that expires. We may end a session, require a fresh sign-in, or apply rate limits where that is necessary to protect the platform or an exam in progress.

You may delete your account from the console at any time. An account that is the sole owner of a workspace cannot be deleted until that ownership has been transferred or the workspace has been deleted, because a workspace with no owner has nobody who can decide anything about it.

A workspace is created by an account, which becomes its owner. The owner and the roles it grants decide who may author an exam, who may run one, who may grade, who may read results, and who may invite or remove a member.

We act on the instructions of the workspace’s administrators. If you are a member of a workspace and want your exams, your results or your membership changed or removed, ask that workspace first: it holds the record and it decides. See section 13 for why this is a data-protection point and not only an administrative one.

A workspace remains responsible for what its members do inside it, including whether the exams it runs are lawful in its jurisdiction and whether the people sitting them have been told what is recorded.

Your content is yours. Creating it on the platform transfers nothing to us.

You grant us the permission we need in order to run the service for you, and no more: to store your content, to transmit it, to back it up, to display it to the people you have authorised, and to process it as the features you use require. That permission lasts as long as we hold the content and exists for the purpose of operating the platform. We do not sell it, we do not use it to train models, and we do not use it to advertise.

Some of it is encrypted at rest with keys scoped to the workspace that owns it: submitted answers, saved drafts, the private fields a workspace requires at sign-in, and the billing email address. That is a property of the storage rather than a promise about cryptography in general; section 15 says what we do and do not warrant.

You are responsible for having the right to put your content on the platform — including any third-party material inside an exam paper — and for its accuracy. We may remove content that breaches the Acceptable Use Policy or the law; see section 12.

While an exam is open, a candidate’s browser holds a live connection to the platform. From that connection and from the server’s own record, the platform observes and stores:

• Presence — whether a connection is being held, and for how long it was not.
• Focus — whether the exam page was the foreground document, and when that changed.
• Reconnection — how many times the connection dropped and returned.
• Timing — when the attempt was opened, when each answer was last written, and when it was submitted, all recorded by the server rather than by the candidate’s device.
• Client description — the browser, operating system and time zone the attempt reported, and the network address the request arrived from.
• Interventions — a message sent to a candidate, an extension of time, a block or a removal from an exam, and which administrator did it.

The platform does not claim, and you must not present it as claiming, that any of this establishes who was at the keyboard, what else was on the machine or in the room, whether a candidate received help, or whether misconduct occurred. A session proves that somebody held the credentials. A focus change proves that the page stopped being in front. Neither proves intent, and no combination of them is a finding.

The platform records observations for a human being to interpret under your own academic process. It does not grade automatically, it does not decide that an attempt was dishonest, and it takes no disciplinary action. Every consequence for a candidate is a decision taken by a person in your institution.

There is no camera, microphone, screen recording, keystroke logging or device inspection in the platform, and no software is installed on a candidate’s machine. If that changes, it will be described here before it is available, and no workspace will be opted into it by default.

The Acceptable Use Policy applies to you and to everybody you admit to a workspace. It covers what the platform may be used for, how the monitoring features may be used, what may be uploaded, and how to report a security problem.

Tell us at [email protected] if you believe somebody is using the platform in breach of it, or if you discover a vulnerability. What we do about a breach is in section 12.

A new workspace starts on the plan marked as the default in the catalogue, which is free. The plans on offer, what each one includes and what each one costs are shown on the pricing page, which reads the catalogue directly — the figures there are the figures the checkout charges.

Payment is taken by our payments provider, which acts as merchant of record: it is the seller on the invoice, it collects the payment, and it is responsible for charging and remitting any applicable sales tax or VAT. Prices are shown exclusive of tax unless stated otherwise, and the amount payable is determined at the checkout for the country you give there.

We are not registered for VAT, so no invoice comes from us and none carries VAT. The provider’s invoice is the one to give your finance office; section 2 says who it is you are buying from.

A paid plan renews at the end of each billing period — monthly or yearly, as chosen — until it is cancelled. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period already paid for: access continues until then, and the workspace returns to the free plan afterwards. We do not pro-rate a part-used period.

Changing plan takes effect as the checkout states at the time. Where a change increases what is payable, it is charged through the provider’s hosted checkout; a change to a free plan takes effect without a payment.

Each plan carries limits — how many people a workspace may hold, how much may be stored, what features are available — and the platform enforces them. Exceeding a limit does not delete anything; it stops the action that would exceed it until the plan is changed.

Refunds beyond your statutory rights and the payments provider’s own policy are at our discretion. Nothing here limits a consumer’s statutory right of withdrawal where one applies.

If a payment fails or is reversed, we may suspend a paid feature or the workspace until it is settled. We will tell the workspace’s billing contact before we do.

We run the platform with care and intend it to be available when you need it. We do not offer a service level agreement or an uptime guarantee unless one is agreed with you separately and in writing.

Maintenance that requires downtime is announced in advance where we can foresee it, and is scheduled away from times when exams are commonly held where we can choose. Some maintenance — a security fix, a failing dependency — cannot wait, and we will apply it and say so.

Parts of the platform degrade rather than fail: a page may render without a live figure, and a monitor may show a stale position, while the underlying record stays intact. An exam in progress is the case we protect first.

Support is by email at [email protected]. We answer as quickly as we can and give priority to a problem affecting an exam that is open.

You are responsible for your own side of an exam: that candidates have a device and a connection that work, that your institution has a procedure for a candidate who loses connectivity, and that a paper is not lost because it existed only in one browser tab.

The platform is released continuously. Features are added, changed and occasionally removed. We will not remove a feature that a workspace depends on to run an exam without notice and, where a replacement exists, a path to it.

We may change these terms. Where a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will give reasonable notice by email to the workspace’s contacts or by a notice in the console before it takes effect, and the version and effective date at the top of this page will change with it. Continuing to use the platform after a change takes effect is acceptance of it; if you do not accept it, stop using the platform and cancel any paid plan.

A correction that does not change meaning — a typo, a broken link, a clearer sentence — is made without notice.

You may stop using the platform at any time: delete your account, or delete the workspace if you own it.

We may suspend or end access where it is necessary — a serious or repeated breach of these terms or of the Acceptable Use Policy, unlawful use, non-payment after notice, or conduct that threatens the platform or another workspace. We act proportionately: a warning or the restriction of one feature before a suspension, and a suspension before an ending, unless the conduct makes that impossible. Where an exam is open, we will not interrupt it unless leaving it running is the greater harm.

Deleting a workspace deletes what it holds: its exams, its attempts and answers, its member list, its uploaded files and its settings. Export what you need first — the console exports results — because the deletion is not reversible and we do not keep a copy to restore from on request.

Deleting an account removes the account and its memberships. It does not delete a workspace’s record of an exam that has already been sat: that record belongs to the institution that ran the exam, and section 13 explains who to ask about it.

Backups are kept for operational recovery and expire on their own schedule; a deletion reaches them as they roll over rather than immediately.

For the personal data of your members and candidates — who they are, what they answered, what was observed while they answered — your institution is the controller and we are the processor. You decide what is collected and why; we process it to provide the platform and on your instructions.

For the data of the account relationship itself — the account you created, the billing contact, our records of support and security — we are the controller.

The Privacy Policy sets out in detail what is held, on what basis, who processes it on our behalf, where it is stored and how long it is kept. Where you require a data processing agreement for your own compliance, write to [email protected].

You are responsible for having a lawful basis for the processing you instruct, for telling your candidates what is recorded while they sit an exam before they sit it, and for handling their requests about their own data. We will help you answer such a request; we will not answer it for you, because the record is yours.

An unpublished exam paper is confidential. We treat your content as confidential and disclose it only to people who need it to operate the platform or where the law requires it — and, where the law requires it and we are permitted to say so, we will tell you.

The platform is ours: the software, the design, the documentation, the name and the marks. These terms grant you the right to use it as a service and transfer nothing else. Do not copy it, resell access to it, or reverse engineer it beyond what the law permits.

If you send us feedback, we may act on it without obligation to you. That is not a claim over your content; it is a claim over nothing more than the suggestion.

The platform is provided as it is and as it is available. To the extent the law permits, we exclude implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the platform will be uninterrupted or error-free, that a connection between a candidate and the platform will hold, that a record will be sufficient evidence in your own process, or — stated plainly, because it is the expectation this industry invites — that the platform will detect academic misconduct. It records what section 7 says it records. Nothing more should be inferred from it.

Nothing in this section excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Neither of us is liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, however caused.

Our total liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred euro. Where you use the platform on a free plan, that second figure is the limit.

You will indemnify us against claims and costs arising from your content, from your use of the platform in breach of this agreement, or from the conduct of people you admitted to a workspace — except to the extent the claim arises from our own breach.

If you are a consumer, this section does not affect your statutory rights, and the limits above apply only to the extent the law permits.

This agreement is governed by the laws of Denmark, and the courts of Denmark have jurisdiction over a dispute arising from it. Either of us may bring proceedings there. If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence and may bring proceedings in its courts.

Before starting proceedings, write to us. Most disagreements are resolved by somebody explaining what actually happened.

We may transfer this agreement as part of a merger, an acquisition or a sale of assets, and will tell you if we do. You may not transfer it without our consent.

If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands. A failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it. There is no partnership, agency or employment between us.

Notices to you go to the email address on your account or to the workspace’s billing contact. Notices to us go to [email protected].

This document, together with the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy, is the whole agreement between us about the platform, and replaces any earlier understanding about it.

Questions about these terms: [email protected]. We are Scholasticus, and there is a person at the other end of that address — the one section 2 describes.