Frequently asked questions

Cost and catch

Is it really free? Yes, permanently. Every feature, unlimited students, no contract, no card and no per-student charge. There is no paid tier, so there is nothing to upgrade to and nothing to lose by not upgrading.

What is the catch? There isn't one, but you are right to ask. Champlin Enterprises builds software for a living; this is one product among several and it does not need to charge to justify itself. We do not sell student data, we do not sell aggregate data, and we do not run advertising. The why it is free page sets out the reasoning at length.

Will you start charging later? Not for anything that is free today. If a genuinely expensive capability appears later, it would be additional rather than a fence around what you already have.

What happens if you go away? Export everything at any time, in open CSV, without asking us. We publish ninety days' notice as a commitment in the data processing agreement. That is a real risk with a free product and you should weigh it.

Getting started

Can I look at it before signing up? Yes. Open the demo and you are signed in as the careers director of a fictional institution that has already run a term. No signup, no email address, and you can change anything: it rebuilds itself every hour.

How long does setup take? About fifteen minutes to a live assessment window, if you have a list of students with email addresses.

Do I need my IT department? No. Signup is self-service and needs no integration. Your IT department may want the trust centre documents, and single sign-on needs your identity team, but neither blocks you from starting.

Do students need accounts? No. The link you send works on its own, with no account and no password. Students can create one if they want their assessments and reports in one place, but nothing requires it.

Does adding a student email them? No. Students hear from you when you open an assessment window, and not before. You can build your whole roster weeks ahead.

What format does the roster import need? CSV with at least first name, last name and email. Student ID, major and class standing are optional and become filters in reporting. Export as CSV rather than Excel.

Can I add one student without a CSV? Yes, there is a form on the Roster page.

Running an assessment

What is the difference between a cohort and a window? A cohort is a named group of students. A window is one round of assessment for one cohort, with its own dates. You can run several windows against the same cohort over time.

How long does the assessment take a student? About ten minutes, around 26 questions across the eight competencies. Answers save as they go, so they can stop and come back.

I lost the assessment links. Have I lost the window? No. Use Email links or Download on that window. Either issues a fresh link to everyone who has not submitted and retires the old one.

Can students change their answers? Yes, up until they submit. After that the answers are fixed, because a report is a picture of a moment.

Who can give 360 feedback? Anybody the student invites who has actually seen them work: a placement supervisor, manager or project instructor. They need no account and take about five minutes.

Can a student see who said what? No. Below your institution's display threshold nothing is shown at all, and above it feedback is aggregated.

Can I run this every term? Yes, and it is the point. Keep the instrument unchanged between terms and the results are comparable.

Results and reporting

Why does Analytics say results are suppressed? Fewer students have submitted than your minimum group size, so nothing is reported. That applies to filtered views too, since filtering forty students down to one would identify them.

What is the gap, and why does it matter more than the score? It is the difference between how a student rates themselves and how the people who watched them work rate them. A high self-score alone tells you very little. A large gap in either direction is the thing worth acting on.

Is being rated higher than you rated yourself bad? No, and it is very common. It usually means underrating something you find easy enough not to notice doing.

Can I use this for grading? You should not, and we design against it. It is a development instrument, and students answer honestly only when they are confident it is not being marked.

What do I hand an accreditor? The accreditation export: one row per outcome per competency, with your mapping, its coverage, both means, the gap and both response rates.

Privacy, security and compliance

Are you FERPA compliant? We act as a school official with a legitimate educational interest under the FERPA school-official exception, and the data processing agreement in the trust centre sets out the terms. Your institution remains the controller of its records.

Do you have SOC 2? No, and we say so plainly. Nor ISO 27001. If your process makes either a hard gate, we do not clear it today.

Has an independent penetration test been done? Not yet. We previously said it would happen before launch; it has not, and we opened signups anyway. Our security posture is self-assessed until that letter exists, at which point it is published.

Where is data stored? In the United States.

Can we delete everything? Yes, from your own settings, at any time, without asking us. Individual students or the whole institution. Deletion is real rather than a flag, and there is no backup we will restore from.

Do you use AI on student data? One feature does: a short written development note on a student's own report, generated from the scores that ordinary code already computed. The model never sees a student's name, email or ID, never produces a number, and never influences any decision. It can be switched off entirely by your institution, and everything else works unchanged.

Accounts and sign-in

How do students sign in? With a password they set, or with Google, Microsoft or LinkedIn. An account can only be created for somebody already on their institution's roster.

A student says LinkedIn does not work when signing up. Almost always because their LinkedIn is on a personal address rather than the campus address you rostered. They should set up with the institution email first, then link LinkedIn from their account page, after which signing in with it works.

A student is on the wrong institution's page. It does not matter. Their email routes them to the right institution, and they cannot get into the wrong one regardless.

Do you support single sign-on? Yes, SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect, configured per institution by your identity team. It is optional.

Can we require single sign-on? Yes. It closes password sign-in for everybody except the institution owner, so a misconfigured identity provider can never lock you out of your own account.

Still stuck

Everything above is also in the product, on the page it applies to. If something is genuinely unclear, tell us: [email protected]. We would rather fix the page than answer the same question twice.