Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) & Data-Handling Posture
For graduate program faculty, registrars, and IT review. This page is a plain-language summary, not a contract — your institution's data-protection addendum (DPA) governs.
We process trainee submissions only when your department creates a workspace and onboards students. Until your administrator signs the DPA appropriate to your institution, we treat the workspace as a sandbox rather than an education-record system of record.
What we collect
- Trainee account: name, email, role within a department workspace.
- Assignment submissions: student-written interpretations of measure batteries, faculty rubric scores and comments.
- Supervised-practicum drafts: trainee-authored case write-ups using de-identified case aliases only — never patient names, MRNs, or other PHI.
- Cohort roster: membership and seat-licensing accounting.
We do not collect PHI in trainee accounts. By default, a department workspace holds training records only; clinical protected health information (PHI) belongs in our separate clinician portal, not here.
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) applicability
| Scenario | FERPA status |
|---|---|
| Self-referred individual (no institutional affiliation) | Not applicable — not an education record |
| Student using platform independently, not via institutional workspace | Not applicable — no legitimate educational interest relationship |
| Student enrolled in a program workspace with DPA in place | FERPA-covered — we act as a school official under the DPA |
| Trainee practicum submissions within workspace | FERPA-covered education records |
Access controls
- Faculty can view their own sections; cross-section access requires program-administrator rights.
- Students see only their own submissions and faculty feedback — not classmates' data.
- Export of education records requires either student consent or a FERPA exception documented in the DPA.
- Workspace administrators can download a full audit log of access events on request.
Service providers
- Hosting: our own private server, run by our engineer on a hosting company’s computers.
- Database: a PostgreSQL database on that server.
- Narrative scoring for the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) and the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT) test: done on that same server by our own fixed-rule word-analysis engine. No outside artificial intelligence (AI) provider is involved, and the text does not leave the server for scoring.
The other service providers we use, such as our payment processor and email provider, are listed in our Privacy Policy.
Retention & deletion
- Records are kept as described in our Privacy Policy: account and assessment records are kept for 7 years on our server, and only self-serve data from personal accounts can be deleted.
- Any different retention terms for an institution are set in that institution’s written agreement with us.
- Students may ask us to delete the data in their own personal accounts at any time through the contact page.
Ready to set up a graduate program workspace?
Request institutional access →