School notice: students' information

This is the notice a school reads before it authorizes AssignHQ to collect information from its students. If you were sent this page, someone at your school is setting AssignHQ up and named you as a person with authority over student records. Reading it takes about three minutes, and the authorization you record refers to this exact version. Our general Privacy Policy covers everything here in more detail and remains our full public notice.

Who we are

AssignHQ lets teachers create, deliver, and grade assignments and assessments, with optional AI tutoring and exam-integrity features. It is operated by the AssignHQ team. Anything in this notice can be questioned, in writing, at admin@assignhq.org, and we answer in writing.

What we collect from students

• The student names your teachers enter on a class roster (in Gradebook classes).
• The answers students submit, the scores and feedback attached to them, and messages students exchange with the built-in AI tutor.
• Only when a teacher switches it on for a specific assessment: an exam screen recording and integrity events (for example, leaving the exam tab). Screen only, never webcam or microphone.
• Where your school provisions student accounts, the school-issued name and email address the school sets up.

We do not collect birth dates, addresses, parent contact details, government or student ID numbers, health or disability information, discipline or attendance records, eligibility status, demographic categories, biometrics, or location.

How it is used, and how it is never used

Student information is used only to provide the service to your school: running the classes your teachers set up, grading, tutoring, and showing teachers their students' work. It is used for your school's educational purposes and for nothing else.

• We never sell or rent student information.
• We never advertise to students, and never use student information for advertising of any kind.
• We never build a profile of a student for any purpose other than providing the service.
• We never use student work to train AI models, ours or anyone's, and our AI providers are contractually barred from training on or retaining what we send them.
• No AI model grades student work. Automatic grading is deterministic software comparing an answer to the teacher's answer key; a teacher assigns and releases every grade.

Who else receives it

Only the service providers named in the Privacy Policy, each bound by terms no less protective than ours: our database and hosting providers, and the AI providers that power question authoring and tutoring. All are based in the United States. We do not send a student's name, email address, or grade to any AI provider.

How long we keep it

Retention windows are published, per record type, at What we store. The short version: exam recordings are deleted within 7 days or when the teacher files the assessment, whichever comes first; and everything else lives only as long as your school's relationship with us plus the published windows. A deletion request is made from your school page, runs 30 days later so that your other administrators can see it and stop it, and can be cancelled by any of them until it does. Your administrators receive written confirmation when it is done, saying what was deleted and what was kept.

How it is protected

Student answers, names, rosters, feedback, tutor conversations, and grades are encrypted at rest under a key that exists for your school alone. The master key that protects it is held in a separate, locked-down key service and never touches the servers that run AssignHQ; a working copy of your school's key is held only in memory, only while the service is running, and is re-fetched from the key service at least every fifteen minutes. Every fetch is written to an audit log, named to your school, in write-once storage that nobody at AssignHQ can edit or erase. We do not claim we could never access student data; our servers decrypt it to show your teachers their own gradebooks. What the design guarantees is that nobody can access it silently, ourselves included: our staff have no application path to your students' data, any emergency access is recorded and your administrators are emailed, and the key service's own log is shown to your administrators on your school page.

Your school's rights

• Ask us, at any time, to show your school everything we hold for its students.
• Tell us to stop collecting anything further.
• Tell us to delete what we hold, in whole or in part.
• Export your school's data at any time, without our involvement — from your school page, as one file.
• See a record of every access to your students' data — by your own administrators, by our staff, and by the key service that holds your school's encryption key — on the same page.
• Withdraw the authorization. Withdrawal stops new collection immediately; it does not by itself delete what is already held, and you can separately direct that.

A parent or guardian who wants to review or delete their child's records should contact the school, and the school directs us. We also publish a notice your school can hand to parents describing all of this in plain language.

The authorization we record

Authorization is recorded once per school, by a named person employed by the school with authority over student records: their name, their title, the exact sentence they acknowledged, and the version of this notice they read. We email that person so an authorization cannot be recorded without them finding out. Recording an authorization does not move any legal duty onto the school or onto any teacher.

Children under 13

Complying with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is our responsibility. It is not the school's and it is not any teacher's. Students under 13 are identified by name in AssignHQ only through a school whose authorization is on record, as described above. On our Free plan there is no school to authorize, so the Free plan holds no student identity at all: students are known by nicknames the Service generates, every question is multiple choice, and there is no tutor and nowhere a student can type free text. That is what lets an individual teacher use it with students of any age without collecting personal information from them.

When this notice changes

If we materially change what we collect from students or how we use it, this notice's version changes, and schools are asked to authorize again before the change applies to them. The version a school authorized is part of its authorization record.