Privacy and student work

GradeHomeworkOnline is run by Aether Analytics LLC (“we”), in the United States.

GradeHomeworkOnline is used by instructors and teaching teams. Students do not have accounts and do not use the service. Student work reaches us only when an instructor uploads it for grading.

• Account details: your email address and name, your country, your courses, and any school or team you belong to.
• What you upload: assignments, rubrics, answer keys, source documents, and student submissions. Submissions and their file names can contain student names and other personal details.
• What grading produces: proposed scores, the reasons for them, feedback, and your corrections and approvals.
• A record of actions: who started, corrected, approved, or downloaded what, and when; and when you agreed to the terms and this policy, and to which version.
• Technical logs: what is needed to run and secure the service, such as request times and errors.
• Shared grading examples, only if you (or your school's or team's owner) turn sharing on: de-identified copies of approved grades, described under Help build better grading.

• To grade the work you upload against the rubric you approve, and to show you the results.
• To keep the service secure and working, and to investigate problems you report.
• For a school, we act on its behalf: we use student work only to provide the service to it, as a “school official” under the U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), except for the optional sharing below, which the school's owner chooses.
• We do not sell personal information, show advertising, or build profiles of students. We do not judge a student's honesty, effort, or intent.
• We use your students' work to build better grading, including our own grading model, only if you turn on “Help build better grading”, or, for a school or team, its owner does. It is off unless turned on.

You can choose to share approved grades with us, on the Dashboard. If you grade with a school or team, only its owner can choose for it. It is off until turned on. When it is on:

• Each grade a person approves is copied, with the assignment's instructions, the rubric, the grading settings, the submission's text, and the proposed and approved scores and feedback, into a collection kept separate from your own data. Grades nobody approved are never copied.
• Before it is stored we remove what could identify a person, a school or a team: names we know of (the submission's label, file names, your courses' names, the name of any school or team, and the names you gave your team), email addresses, telephone numbers, web addresses, and long numbers such as student IDs. We do not keep account or job identifiers with it; only codes that let us trace a copy back to its source if we must.
• Automatic removal can miss a detail a student wrote about themselves, so we call these copies de-identified, not anonymous, and nothing is used to train or test a model until it has been checked again.
• We use the collection to measure and improve grading and to build our own grading models. We do not sell it, and only the few people who work on it can read it.
• Turning sharing off stops it at once. Copies already shared are kept, also when you later delete jobs, your account, or a school or team. We remove them where the law requires it.
• By turning it on, you (or the owner) confirm you may share the work this way, for example because your school or institution allows it.
• Sharing is not offered in the European Union, the European Economic Area, or the United Kingdom, or before you (or your school or team) have said which country you are in.

To grade a submission, its text is sent, together with the assignment and rubric, to an AI model provider that we use to read it. We are finishing our written terms with providers, including how long they may keep what is sent and that it is not used to train their models. Until that is done the service stays in pre-release, and we ask you to grade sample work rather than real student records.

• Data is stored with our cloud hosting provider in the United States.
• It is encrypted when it is stored and when it travels between you and us.
• Your data is kept separate from everyone else's, and each school's or team's from every other. Inside a school or team, people see only what their role allows.
• We share data only with the companies that help us run the service (hosting, sign-in, and AI model providers), and when the law requires it.

These cookies are needed for the site to work and are always set:

• agp_session and agp_refresh: keep you signed in, for up to seven days. Encrypted, and removed when you sign out.
• agp_signin: protects the sign-in step, for ten minutes.
• agp_consent: remembers your cookie choice, for 180 days. It holds only “accepted” or “rejected”.

Optional cookies, such as analytics, load only after you choose Accept. We use none today and no advertising or tracking pixels at all. If we add an optional service, it will be named here first.

You can change your choice at any time:

How long we keep it

You choose how long your grading jobs are kept; for a school or team, its owners and administrators choose. This is on the Dashboard under “Delete grading jobs automatically”: 6, 12 or 24 months after a job's last activity, or until someone deletes them. A new account, school or team starts on 12 months.

A job's last activity is the latest of: when it was created, when grading started, when grading finished, and its most recent correction, approval or grades download. From 14 days before a job is deleted automatically, the date is shown next to the job and on its results page; we do not send an email about it. A change to the setting applies to no job for 14 days, so no job is deleted automatically without its date having been shown for at least 14 days. If you stop paying, your data stays until someone deletes it or this setting removes it.

Deleting it yourself

• A grading job: you can delete your own jobs; in a school or team, the course's instructors and its owners and administrators can. Delete a job from My grading or from its results page. Its submissions, grades, feedback, corrections and approvals are deleted straight away, and its files within about an hour. A deleted job cannot be restored. A job cannot be deleted while it is being graded.
• A school or team: an owner can delete the whole school or team from the Dashboard. Grading and buying stop at once. For 7 days members can still read and download their work, and any owner can cancel. After 7 days its courses, assignments, rubrics, uploaded files, grading jobs, members and invitations are deleted, and its name is erased.
• Your account: you can delete your own account from the Dashboard. It is deleted after 7 days unless you cancel. Your sign-in and email address are then removed, with your own assignments, rubrics and grading, and you leave any school or team. A school or team where you are the only member is deleted too. If you are the only owner of one that has other members, make someone else an owner first, or write to us.

Students and parents who want to see, correct, or remove a student's work should ask the school or instructor who uploaded it. We will help the school respond.

What we keep after a deletion

• Billing records: payments, invoices, plan changes and how much was used, kept for seven years for tax and accounting. They hold no student work. Our payment provider, Stripe, keeps the invoices and the billing details given at checkout.
• A record of actions: for example, that a job was created, graded and later deleted, by whom and when, and how many submissions it had. It never holds student work, file names or names of students.
• Your agreement to the terms: which version, and when.
• Backups: deleted data can remain in our database backups until those backups expire.
• Technical logs: these include IP addresses, pages requested, times and errors. They hold no student work, and are kept for up to one year to run and secure the service.
• Shared grading examples: if you or your school or team shared approved grades, their de-identified copies are kept; see Help build better grading.

What we cannot delete

• Files you downloaded, such as grade exports, are on your own device.
• Text already sent to an AI model provider for grading is kept under that provider's terms (see “AI model providers”).

To ask what we hold, or for help deleting it, write to support@gradehomeworkonline.com from the address on your account.

The instructor or institution that uploads student work decides what is uploaded and is responsible for having the right to share it with us. Many U.S. schools and districts sign a student data privacy agreement with each service they use. We sign the Student Data Privacy Consortium's National Data Privacy Agreement, or your institution's own agreement, on request: contact us.

Work by students under 13 may be uploaded only by or for a school, which gives consent on the parents' behalf for this school use, as the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) allows. An instructor working outside a school may not upload it.

• For grading, we process student work on your behalf and on your instructions: you decide why it is processed, and we are your processor under the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Our data processing agreement applies automatically; you do not need to ask for it.
• Data is stored in the United States. The data processing agreement includes the EU standard contractual clauses and the UK addendum to them for this transfer, and for transfers to the companies that help us run the service.
• Sharing approved grades is not offered in the EU, the European Economic Area, or the UK.
• We will name our representatives in the EU and the UK on this page before we serve customers there.

If this page changes in a way that matters, we will say so on the site before it takes effect.