How ASCEND handles your data

The short version

• Your grades and results are private. Only you can see them.
• We do not sell your data.
• Your university does not see your data.
• You can download everything, or delete everything, at any time.

What we collect

• Your account: your name, email address and password. Your password is stored scrambled (hashed), so nobody can read it, including us.
• Your profile: institution, faculty, department, level, session, target CGPA, programme units, and anything optional you add, such as your matric number, strong and weak subjects, career interests and study preferences.
• Your academic records: the semesters, courses, units and grades you save.
• Your goals: your current courses, assessments, targets, scores and the notes you write after an assessment.
• Your study sessions: the course, how many minutes you studied, the date, your answers to the check-in after a session, and any note you add.
• Your study settings: your weekly study goal, your partner code, who your study partners are, whether your coursemates can find you, and whether your partners can see when you're online.
• When you were last on ASCEND: the time you last opened a page (saved at most once a minute), and when a focus session or break you started will end.
• Study rooms: the rooms you start or join, who was in them, your quiz answers and marks, your cheers and "Ask the room" questions, and the questions you report as wrong. Room messages are deleted after 30 days.
• Notes you add to a study room: ASCEND reads them to make questions, then throws them away. An uploaded PDF is deleted as soon as it has been read. Only the questions are kept.
• Your timetable: the classes you add, with their days, times and venues. ASCEND uses it to show your classes each day and to plan your reading.
• Your attendance: the classes you mark attended, missed or cancelled, and when you marked them. Only you can see it.
• Feedback you send: your message, what it is about, the page you sent it from, and your kind of phone and browser (for example "Android · Chrome"), so we can find a problem.

Why we collect it

Only to give you ASCEND's features: working out your GPA and CGPA with your institution's rules, showing what you need to reach your target, and tracking your goals. We do not use your data for advertising.

Who can see it

• You. Every page checks that the data belongs to the person logged in.
• Your study partners, only if you add them. They see your first name, your study streak, your study time this week, whether you studied today, and your pair streak (how many days in a row you have both studied). They also see whether you're online or focusing right now, and when you were last active, for example "Active 2 h ago". Never your grades, results, courses, attendance or notes. You can stop sharing either of these, or remove a partner, at any time. If you hide when you're online, you can't see theirs either.
• Your coursemates, only if you choose "Show me to my coursemates". Students at your institution, in your department and level, who made the same choice see your full name, so they can send you a study request. Never your grades, results or study details. You can hide again at any time.
• People in a study room with you. They see your first name, whether you are there, how far you are through the quiz, your result in that room, and your cheers and questions. Never your grades or other study details.
• Other students taking the same topic. Questions ASCEND AI makes for a topic go into a shared question bank for that course, without your name. Questions made from your own notes are shared only if you tick "Share the questions from my notes".
• The ASCEND team can technically reach the database to keep the service running and fix problems. We only do that for those reasons. We read the feedback you send, with your name and email, so we can reply. To see how ASCEND is used, we look at totals, such as how many students studied this week, never at one student's grades.
• Our service providers. Your data is stored with Supabase, a database company, and the ASCEND website runs on Render, a hosting company. Both are in the European Union (Frankfurt, Germany). Emails such as your confirmation code are sent through an email provider.
• ASCEND AI. The questions and theory marks come from Claude, an AI made by Anthropic in the United States. To make or mark questions, ASCEND sends Anthropic your course, level, institution and topic, your notes if you add them, and your theory answers. Never your name, email or grades. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, this is not used to train its AI.
• Nobody else. If ASCEND ever works with your university, nothing about you will be shared without asking you first.

Cookies and your device

ASCEND uses one cookie, which keeps you logged in. It is removed when you close your browser. You are logged out after 30 minutes without activity, and after 12 hours in any case. From Me, you can also log out on every phone and computer at once. Your light or dark theme choice is saved on your own device only. So are a focus timer while it runs, a finished session that is waiting for the internet to come back, and your Pomodoro and background-sound choices.

Keeping ASCEND secure

To stop people guessing passwords, ASCEND remembers recent login attempts (the email and the internet address they came from) for up to an hour. Our hosting company also keeps short server logs (internet address, the page asked for and the time) to keep the site working and safe. These are deleted automatically and are never used for anything else.

How long we keep it

Until you delete it. When you delete your account, everything is removed from our database straight away. Any backup copies held by our database provider expire on their own.

Your rights

You can see, correct, download and delete your data. Most of this you can do yourself:

• Correct it: edit your profile, semesters and goals.
• Download it, or delete your account: go to Me, after logging in.

For anything else, email attahmike916@gmail.com.