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Academic Integrity Policy

Your responsibilities to your instructor and your school.

Effective date: 4 September 2026 Last revised: 4 September 2026

This policy is part of the Terms of Service. It is separate from the other documents because it is the one you most need to read, and it deserves its own page rather than a clause buried in section 8 of something else.

Read it alongside the AI Output Disclaimer, which says what the generated text is and is not.

Read this before you use assignment drafting

CourseLite can read one of your assignments and write a draft of it. That is a real capability and we are not going to be coy about it.

What it cannot do is decide whether handing that draft in is allowed in your course. Only your instructor and your institution decide that, the rules differ between two courses in the same department, and the consequence of getting it wrong falls entirely on you.

So: know your course's rules before you use the draft. If you are not sure, ask your instructor. "I did not know" has never worked as a defence at an academic-integrity hearing.

1. What CourseLite is

CourseLite is a study and drafting assistant. It:

  • reads the course material you already have access to,
  • answers questions from that material and shows where each answer came from,
  • generates flashcards, practice tests and study notebooks from it, and
  • can draft a response to an assignment, into a document in your own Google Drive.

It is a tool that produces text for you to work with. It is not a source of verified answers, not a co-author with any standing, and not a substitute for learning the material.

2. You are responsible for your instructor's and your school's rules

This is the whole policy in one sentence: what your instructor allows is the rule, and CourseLite does not know what that is.

You agree that:

  1. You will find out what is allowed. Read the syllabus. Read your institution's academic-integrity policy. If AI use is not addressed, ask — before you use it, not after.
  2. Those rules override the product. A feature existing in CourseLite is not permission to use it. Some courses ban AI outright, some allow it for brainstorming only, some allow it with disclosure, some allow it freely. CourseLite behaves identically in all four cases; you are the one who knows which one you are in.
  3. Rules vary per assignment. The same instructor may allow AI on a problem set and forbid it on the essay. Check per assignment.
  4. Disclosure may be required. Many institutions now require you to declare AI assistance and to say how you used it. If yours does, do it.
  5. Citation practice may apply. Some courses expect AI assistance to be cited like any other source. Follow whatever form your course requires.

We do not know your rules and cannot enforce them. CourseLite has no knowledge of your institution's policy, no way to read it, and no way to check your work against it.

3. Drafts must be reviewed and revised

A CourseLite draft is a starting point, not a finished submission.

Before you hand in anything CourseLite produced, you must:

  • read every word of it;
  • check every factual claim against the course material or another reliable source — the model can fabricate facts, misattribute quotes, invent citations and get arithmetic wrong, and it does all of this in a confident voice;
  • check that it answers the question actually asked, in the format actually required, at the required length;
  • check the sources. CourseLite shows where an answer came from, and that makes it traceable, not correct. The passage it points at may not support the claim; it may not be the passage your instructor had in mind; and a reference entry it could not resolve is rendered as unfinished on purpose, so that you finish it rather than hand in a fabricated one;
  • check for unattributed copying. A draft assembled from course material may reproduce phrasing from that material. Quoting and citing it properly is your job, and passing it off as your own words is plagiarism whether a model or a person put it there; and
  • revise it into your own work.

Submitting a CourseLite draft unread and unchanged is the single most likely way to get into trouble with this product.

4. CourseLite does not submit your work, and has no way to

There is no submission path in CourseLite. There never has been, and building one is not a detail somebody will fill in later. This is a rule in the codebase (CLAUDE.md rule 27) and it is enforced by the architecture, not by an intention.

Verified in the implementation:

  • The only connection CourseLite makes to Canvas is a read. The single HTTP client that talks to Canvas hard-codes method: "GET" (src/ingest/canvas/session.ts:146-157) and can only reach an allowlist of read-only paths (src/ingest/canvas/session.ts:131-133). There is no POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE to any Canvas host anywhere in the project.
  • The server never talks to Canvas at all. Only your own browser does, using the Canvas session you are already signed into. Your Canvas password, token and cookies never leave your machine and never reach us.
  • "Submitted" is Canvas's word, and we only read it. CourseLite stores Canvas's own submission status so it can show you what is still outstanding. That column is never written by us, and having a draft never marks an assignment as submitted (CLAUDE.md rule 27 — homework_drafts.status and assignments.submission_state are separate columns and neither derives from the other).
  • A draft goes into your Drive, not to your school. When CourseLite writes a draft into a Google Doc or Slides deck, that file is created in your Google account, is never shared with anyone, and is never sent anywhere. You can rewrite it or delete it there.

You press submit. Every time, having read what you are submitting. That is the boundary this product is built around, and the Acceptable Use Policy forbids you from building an automation that removes it.

5. No guarantee that generated material is acceptable for your course

We do not warrant, and you must not assume, that anything CourseLite produces:

  • is accurate, complete, or current;
  • is original, or free of material that resembles a source closely enough to be flagged;
  • meets your assignment's requirements;
  • would pass a plagiarism or AI-detection check; or
  • is permitted by your course, your department, or your institution.

On AI-detection tools. Institutions use detectors that claim to identify AI-generated writing. They are unreliable in both directions — they flag human writing and miss machine writing — but they are used to open misconduct cases anyway. CourseLite makes no claim about whether its output will be detected, does nothing to evade detection, and would not help you if it could.

6. What CourseLite must not be used for

The following are prohibited under the Acceptable Use Policy and under this policy.

6.1 Exams and proctored assessments

Do not use CourseLite during an exam, quiz, test, or any assessment you are being asked to complete unaided. This includes take-home exams and timed online assessments where outside help is not permitted.

This line is enforced in the product, not merely stated: when an assignment's Canvas type is a quiz, CourseLite refuses to draft it and says so — "This is a quiz. CourseLite does not sit in quizzes or assessments — that line has not changed." (functions/lib/homework.ts:156-157, the online_quiz entry in UNSUPPORTED_SUBMISSION_TYPES). Assignments delivered through an external assessment tool — external_tool and external_lti — are refused for the same reason, as are assignments handed in on paper and assignments Canvas says have nothing to submit.

That refusal is a product rule, and it is not a filter you should try to get around. It also cannot see everything: an assessment your instructor set as an ordinary assignment will not be refused, and using CourseLite on it is still a breach of this policy.

6.2 Impersonation and work for other people

Do not use CourseLite to:

  • complete coursework, an assessment, or an application on behalf of another student;
  • produce work that somebody else hands in as their own;
  • run a service that produces coursework for other people; or
  • sit anything, or communicate with an instructor, as somebody else.

One person, one account. An account is for its holder's own coursework.

6.3 Prohibited assessments generally

Do not use CourseLite for any assessment where its use is prohibited — by your instructor, your department, your institution, a professional body, a certification provider, or a licensing authority.

6.4 Anything else your rules forbid

If your course's rules forbid it, this policy forbids it. That clause is deliberately open-ended, because your rules are the ones that matter.

7. The consequences fall on you

We want to be blunt about this, because the asymmetry is real.

If you submit work that breaks your institution's rules, the consequence is yours. That can mean a zero, a failed course, a permanent note on your record, suspension, expulsion, a withdrawn offer, or a lost scholarship or visa status.

CourseLite cannot help you if that happens. We are not a party to your relationship with your school, we have no standing in an academic-integrity process, and we cannot vouch for how you used the product. Section 16 of the Terms of Service excludes our liability for academic consequences, and that exclusion is there because the decision to hand something in is one only you can make.

8. What we do if we learn of misuse

If we learn that an account is being used to break this policy — running a coursework service for other people, completing assessments for other students, or automating submission — we may suspend or terminate it under Section 17 of the Terms.

We do not monitor your coursework, we do not report students to their institutions as a matter of course, and we have no relationship with any school through which we could. If a school or a law enforcement body makes a lawful request, we respond as the Privacy Policy describes.

9. If you are an instructor or an institution

We are not going to pretend this product is invisible to you.

CourseLite drafts homework from a course's own material, and it is marketed that way. What it does not do is submit, and what it will not do is help a student sit an assessment they were asked to sit unaided — that refusal is in the code, not just in this document (Section 6.1).

If you have a concern about how CourseLite is being used in your course, contact support@courselite.org. We will not confirm or deny whether any individual holds an account, because that is their personal information, but we will act on a credible report of the misuse described in Section 6.

10. Questions

If you are not sure whether a particular use is allowed, the order is:

  1. Ask your instructor. They are the only person who can actually answer it.
  2. Read your institution's academic-integrity policy.
  3. If it is a question about what CourseLite does — what it sends where, what it can and cannot reach, whether it submits anything — ask us at support@courselite.org and we will tell you plainly.

We can tell you how the product works. We cannot tell you whether your professor allows it.