Essay and application platforms

Application essays are the most personal documents your students produce. The clauses to read first on any essay platform are the AI-training clause and the content-license clause: what happens to the writing after the feedback comes back.

Start with these explainers

• "We never sell your data": it depends what "sell" means

  Sharing data with partners for something of value can count as selling under state law, or not count under a policy's own definition. How to read the claim.

• The bankruptcy clause: student data when a platform is acquired or folds

  Most privacy policies let data transfer in a merger, acquisition, or bankruptcy. What the clause looks like and what happened when the FTC intervened.

• AI training clauses: is your students' writing training someone's model?

  How to spot the clause that lets a platform train AI on student essays and records, and the difference between running AI and training AI.

• Does FERPA protect your students' data? For IECs, mostly no

  FERPA binds schools that take federal funds, not independent educational consultants. What actually protects the data families hand to your practice.

• "Delete" versus "de-identify and retain"

  Many platforms honor deletion requests by removing the name and keeping the rest. How to tell which kind of delete a policy actually promises.

• If the platform is free, what is the business model?

  Free tools for your practice are paid for somehow. The revenue models behind free edtech and the policy clauses that reveal which one you are looking at.

Evaluating a specific platform in this category? Take the checklist to the demo, and run its policy through the prompt pack first.