Academic Integrity Statement

Every AI agent inside StudySec is designed around the same idea: we help you do the work, we don't do it for you. The Organisation Agent files your lectures so you can find them. The Notes Agent turns raw material into structured notes you can revise from. The Research Agent finds and cites sources you can build on. The Planning Agent proposes a schedule you can keep. The Quiz Agent generates practice questions from your own notes. None of these produces the essay paragraph, the exam answer, or the coursework prose you submit as yours.

Almost everything that sits around the act of writing your own work, we are happy to do:

• Organising your material — filing lectures, slides, and reading into the right subjects and topics.
• Generating structured notes from your uploads — always traceable back to the lecture or document they came from.
• Conducting research with citations — sources you can click through and verify, not summaries to be taken on faith.
• Planning your work — essay outlines, revision schedules, lists of sources to read.
• Generating practice questions — drawn from your own notes, so you can test what you know.
• Explaining concepts — in your course's context, with sources, so you understand the material rather than just receive an answer.

In all of these, we show you where the AI's work came from, and we mark what was AI-generated as distinct from what you wrote. That is how we keep the distinction honest.

There is a small set of things we are built to steer away from:

• Writing essay paragraphs you intend to submit as your own work.
• Writing exam answers for assessments you are sitting.
• Writing coursework prose to be submitted under your name.
• Any task that amounts to producing the assessed work itself, regardless of how it is framed.

If you ask for an essay introduction, the Research Agent will offer to help you structure one and find the studies to anchor it — not produce the prose for you. The steering is gentle: we don't refuse loudly or moralise, we offer the help that fits our position and let you carry on with the writing.

Sometimes the steering above isn't enough — a pattern of requests builds up that plainly looks like attempts to have the AI produce assessed work. When that happens, our approach is soft and stepped:

• First occurrence: we show a gentle in-product reminder of where we stand, with a link to this statement. You read it or skip past it; nothing else happens.
• Second occurrence: we email you about what we have seen and link to this statement again. No account action is taken; the email is a conversation, not a warning.
• Repeated, deliberate misuse: if the pattern is plain and persistent — particularly if it looks like coordinated abuse rather than individual judgement — we may suspend or close the account. Section 10 of the Terms of Service explains how that process works.

We are deliberately patient about this. The line between assistance and ghostwriting is genuinely contested in education right now, and students sometimes test it without bad intent. Our default is to talk first, give you the benefit of the doubt, and reserve account action for cases where the pattern is unambiguous.

StudySec has no formal relationship with universities, schools, or exam boards. We don't talk to your institution on your behalf, we don't approve your work, and we don't tell anyone what you have used the product for. The position in this statement is ours; the rules that apply to your actual assessments are theirs.

Academic integrity rules vary widely. Some institutions allow extensive AI use. Some restrict it sharply. Some require you to declare which parts of your work were AI-assisted. It is your responsibility to know the rules where you study, and to follow them. If your institution asks for a declaration of AI use, the source attribution built into the product is there to draw on — your notes show which document each piece of generated content came from, and your research chats cite their sources.

We could have built a product that wrote essays on demand. We chose not to. Learning works when students do the thinking — a tool that does the thinking for you doesn't make you a better student, it just produces work you can't defend. The students we built StudySec for are capable people who want to learn their material and have a life; they don't need a ghostwriter, they need a secretary who clears the path.

And the risk of being caught using AI to produce assessed work is yours alone — the consequences range from a failing mark to expulsion, and we have no interest in encouraging anyone to take that risk on our account. Being clear about what the product is for, and what it is not, is part of treating you as a capable adult.

If you have a question about anything in this statement — including a worry that something the AI has produced might cross the line — email us at support@studysec.app. We will respond within five working days.

If your institution contacts us with a concern about how StudySec is being used, we will engage with them in good faith, within the limits of what we can know and what we are legally able to share.