Privacy Policy

Who is responsible for your data

When a school, college or university gives you Scholar, that institution decides what is recorded about its students and staff — courses, marks, attendance — and is responsible for it. We run Scholar for them and handle that data on their instructions. Their own privacy notice applies too, and requests about their records are best sent to them first.

When you use Scholar on your own — your own homework, timetable and study plans — Varaxis is responsible for your data.

What we collect

• Your account: your name and email address, whether and when you confirmed that the address is yours, which version of the terms you agreed to and when, and your password stored only as a one-way hash. If you sign in with Google, GitHub or Microsoft, that provider gives us your name, email address, profile picture and whether it has verified the address — nothing else, and never your password. If you sign in through your institution’s own sign-in, it gives us your name, email address and an identifier it uses for you, which we keep so the same person reaches the same account; and if your address is on a domain your institution owns, you may be added to it, or asked to join it, when you first sign in. To slow down password guessing and unwanted email, we keep short-lived counts of sign-in failures, signups and reset requests for each account and each IP address; an account’s count is kept under a one-way hash of its email address. Each count covers at most an hour, and only the latest is kept.
• What you put in: the tasks, deadlines, subjects, notes and timetable you add (typed, dictated or uploaded), your study sessions, files you attach, and posts in study groups you join.
• What your institution records: the courses you are in, work set and handed in, marks and feedback, attendance, announcements, links to parents or guardians the institution has added, and a log of changes to records (for example, who changed a mark and when).
• Settings: your preferences, and, for a teacher who connects one, access to their Google calendar for creating meetings, which is encrypted before it is stored. If you belong to no university on Scholar, the AI key you choose to save, encrypted before it is stored and never shown again; a university’s members use the AI Varaxis provides to their university, and a saved key is deleted when you join one.
• Proctored tests, only while you sit one: webcam pictures and a record of flags — see Proctored tests.
• Error reports: when something breaks, a technical report of the error, with IP addresses, cookies and request headers removed.
• Usage counts, only if you allow them: see Cookies.
• If you write to us, or your institution buys Scholar: the names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of the people we deal with, and what was said and agreed, so we can answer, send quotes and keep the agreement. A message sent from the contact form goes straight to our inbox with what you typed in it; Scholar itself doesn’t keep a copy. This is kept for as long as we have a relationship with the institution, and you can ask us to remove your details.

We do not ask Scholar’s users for their date of birth, phone number, home address or location. We don’t record your screen, capture what you type or click for analytics, or build an advertising profile of you. We use your camera and microphone only during a proctored test, and only as described below.

How we use it

• To run Scholar for you and your institution: show your work, plan your study, keep records.
• To keep it working and secure: fix errors, stop abuse, keep an audit trail of changes.
• To understand which features get used — only with your permission, and only as counts.
• To meet legal obligations.

We don’t sell your data, share it with advertisers, or use it to train AI models.

AI features

Some features use an AI provider: for students, reading homework from a photo or a sentence, study suggestions, reading a syllabus and the study coach; for teachers, drafting a quiz, importing a question paper, Write with AI and marking drafts. For an institution’s members,Varaxis provides the AI to the institution, which chooses the provider; somebody in no institution may connect their own. The providers are Google Gemini, Groq, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, or a model run privately. Only the text (or image, or audio) a request needs is sent, and the provider handles it under its own terms. Where Scholar supplies the provider itself, requests go through our account with it.

A marking draft sends the assignment’s brief and the student’s answer, without their name or email address. It is only ever a suggestion: a teacher reads it and decides every mark, and the record of the mark says whether a model was involved.

With no provider connected, Scholar uses a built-in reader that sends nothing anywhere. AI answers can be wrong; check anything that matters.

If you dictate, your browser’s own speech recognition may be used, and some browsers (such as Chrome) send that audio to their maker to turn it into text.

Proctored tests

A teacher can choose to proctor a test. Before it starts, you are told exactly what is recorded, and the test does not open until you tick a box agreeing to it. While you sit it:

• Camera: a small still picture about every 30 seconds, at moments that vary, and one whenever something is flagged. No video is recorded.
• Microphone: only how loud the room is, measured in your browser. No sound is recorded, stored or sent anywhere.
• Flags: leaving fullscreen, switching tab or window, opening the test again (a reload, another window or another device), copying, pasting, blocked shortcuts, a second screen being connected, a camera that looks like virtual-camera software, no face or more than one face in view, looking away, and noise — each with the time it happened.
• Face check: done on your own device by software Scholar serves itself. No picture is sent to anyone to do it, and it is not facial recognition: it checks that a face is there, not whose it is.
• Your answers are saved to Scholar as you go, so reloading the page puts them back.
• Your name is shown faintly across the questions on your own screen. It is not recorded anywhere by being shown.

Leaving the test. A teacher can set a limit on how many times you may leave the test screen — exiting fullscreen, switching to another window, tab or app, or reloading the page. Each time, you are warned on screen, and at the limit the test is handed in automatically with the answers you have (or, if your browser does not hand it in, with the answers last saved). You are told the number before you start, and the teacher sees that the test was handed in this way. Nothing a camera or microphone check notices — a face, a sound — ever counts toward it.

The pictures and flags are seen only by the test’s teachers and your institution’s administrators. A flag is a prompt for a teacher to look, not a finding, and never changes a mark by itself. Everything is deleted 30 days after the test closes, unless a teacher marks the sitting as under review, in which case it is kept until they clear it. Pictures are stored with Scholar’s other files, as described below.

Who can see your data

• You.
• Your institution’s staff, according to their role: a teacher sees work, marks and attendance for the courses they teach, and the record of a proctored test they set; administrators see their institution’s records.
• Parents or guardians your institution has linked to you. You can see who is linked.
• Classmates, in two places: study groups you join, and marks leaderboards, which show the top ten on a published test by name. You can choose not to be named, from the leaderboard on your course page; you then appear as “A classmate”.
• People you share with, if you share your planner from Settings.

Services we use

These companies process data for us, only to provide their part of Scholar:

• Vercel — hosting, and storage for uploaded files.
• Our managed PostgreSQL provider — the database.
• Google, GitHub and Microsoft — sign-in, if you choose them; or your institution’s own sign-in service, if it has connected one.
• Resend — sending Scholar’s emails, described below, and passing messages from the contact form to our inbox. It receives the names, addresses and messages involved.
• Google Calendar and Google Meet — if a teacher connects their Google account to schedule online classes. Scholar then creates each meeting on that teacher’s own calendar, sending Google the class’s name, the meeting’s title and its time — no student’s name or email. The teacher can disconnect at any time from the class’s Online classes tab, which also revokes Scholar’s access at Google.
• Sentry — error reports.
• PostHog (EU) — usage counts, only if you allow them.
• The AI provider you or your institution connect, as above.

Some of them are based outside your country, so your data may be processed abroad.

Children

Scholar is used by students, many of them under 18. If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian to agree to your using Scholar — or your institution to provide it — before you create an account, and you confirm this when you sign up.

We collect only what Scholar needs, never show ads, and don’t track children for advertising or profiling. A parent or guardian can ask to see or delete their child’s data by writing to us from the address below; for records an institution keeps, the institution can do this too.

Download or delete your data

• Download everything we hold about you as a file: Settings → Account → Download.
• Delete a task from your dashboard at any time; it is removed straight away.
• Delete your account: Settings → Account → Delete account. It takes effect immediately and removes your account, your coursework, timetable, study history, settings, groups you own and your posts from our live database, or closes it if your institution keeps records about you (below). Copies in our database provider’s backups expire on its backup schedule.
• Can’t sign in? Email hello@vxscholar.com from the address on your account with the subject “Delete my Scholar account”. We confirm once it is done, within 30 days.

Some records belong to your institution rather than to you: work you handed in and its marks, attendance, test sittings and extension requests. If your institution holds any of these, Delete account closes your account instead of deleting it:

• Everything that is yours is deleted straight away, as it would be if the account were deleted: your tasks, attachments, groups you own and your posts, study history, timetable, settings, saved AI keys, and every way of signing in. You are signed out everywhere, and the account can’t be signed in to again.
• Your email address is freed, so you can sign up again later. That is a new account, with nothing from the old one in it.
• Your institution keeps its records about you, with the name and email it knew you by, for the retention period it has set (seven years unless it chose otherwise). Settings tells you the date before you close the account.
• Within a day of that date the records are anonymised: your name and email are removed, and so are what you wrote (work you handed in, typed answers, notes and messages about it), any files and proctoring pictures, and your name in the institution’s activity log. Marks, attendance and dates stay, with no name on them, so the institution’s grades and reports still add up.

If you belong to more than one institution, each keeps its own records for its own period.

How long we keep it

For as long as your account exists, or until you delete the item. Your institution’s records about you are kept for as long as you are a member and, after you leave, for the retention period it sets, from one to thirty years, and are then anonymised as described above. Proctored-test pictures and flags are deleted sooner: 30 days after the test closes, unless a teacher is reviewing them. Error reports and usage counts are kept by those services for a limited period and then deleted.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask to see, correct, download or delete your data, to withdraw consent, and to object to or limit how it is used. Most of this you can do yourself in Settings; for anything else, write to us. You can also complain to your data protection authority — in India the Data Protection Board, in the UK the ICO, in the EU your national authority.

Security

Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as hashes, API keys are encrypted, and each person sees only what their role allows. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

Emails and notifications

Scholar sends you two emails, both about your account: a link to confirm your address when you sign up with a password, and a link to reset your password when you ask for one. Each link works once and expires. An institution’s administrators also get a short email when its AI allowance reaches 75%, 90% and 100%, so the AI features don’t pause by surprise. Until your address is confirmed, nothing your institution has set up for it, like an invitation, reaches your account, because anybody can type an address on a signup form. Scholar does not send marketing email. If we ever send email that isn’t strictly about your account, every message will have a one-click unsubscribe link.

If you turn on notifications for a phone or computer in Settings, Scholar keeps what that browser’s push service (Google’s, Apple’s, Mozilla’s or Microsoft’s) needs to reach it: an address at that service, two encryption keys and a name like “Chrome on Android”. Each notification is encrypted for your device, so the push service carries it without being able to read it. It says that work was set, an announcement was posted, a mark is ready (never the mark itself) or, in the morning, what on your own list is due soon. You choose which kinds you get, and signing out of a browser stops its notifications.

Photographs of your work, and reading kept offline

When you hand in photographs or a PDF of your work, only you and the people who mark that work can open them, and a teacher opening them is recorded. They are kept with the work they belong to, for as long as your institution keeps handed-in work, and deleted with it. Pages you upload but never hand in are deleted after two days. Reading you save for offline stays on your own device, not on our servers, until you remove it or sign out.

Your institution's LMS, course packages and videos

If your institution opens Scholar from its own learning system (Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard and others), that system tells Scholar your name, email address and whether you teach or study the course, and Scholar sends it the marks your teachers release on work placed there. Course packages (SCORM and H5P) run walled off from the rest of Scholar and are given an anonymous number, not your name; Scholar keeps where you got to and the result the package reports, never how long you spent. A YouTube video plays through YouTube’s no-cookie address and a Vimeo video with tracking turned off; where you stopped in a video is remembered on your device only. If your institution connects its student records system, that system tells Scholar which classes you are in, and Scholar sends it the marks your teachers release.

Cookies

We use only the cookies Scholar needs to work, plus usage counts if you allow them. The cookie policy lists every one.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, we update the date at the top. If a change affects how your data is used, we will say so in the app before it takes effect.

Contact and grievances

Varaxis Scholar is provided by Varaxis. Write to hello@vxscholar.com about anything on this page, including privacy requests and complaints. We reply within 30 days, and sooner where the law asks for it.