Terms of Use
The short version
- GroupMark runs entirely on your device. Your student data never leaves your machine.
- GroupMark is free to use, with no accounts and no feature limits.
- Donations are voluntary and don't unlock anything — the app is, and stays, free.
- The email results feature sends directly via your SMTP server. Credentials are stored securely in your OS keychain, and we recommend using an app-specific password.
- AI features are opt-in. Only your blank task template is sent externally, never student work.
- You own your data. We don't collect, store, or sell it.
Contents
1. Agreement to these terms
By downloading or using GroupMark, you agree to these terms. If you're using GroupMark as part of your employment (for example, as a teacher at a school), you're agreeing on behalf of yourself, not your employer. GroupMark is licensed to individual users, not institutions.
If you don't agree with these terms, please don't use GroupMark.
2. Your licence to use GroupMark
GroupMark is free to use. When you download it, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the software on devices you own or control. The licence is free and perpetual for the version you have installed; it isn't conditional on any subscription or payment.
This licence is for your own professional use. You may not:
- Resell, sublicence, or redistribute GroupMark
- Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code
- Use GroupMark to build a competing product
GroupMark accepts voluntary donations (for example, "buy the developer a coffee"). Donations are entirely optional, non-refundable, and confer no additional rights, features, or access — everything in GroupMark is available to everyone for free.
3. Your data and privacy
GroupMark is designed to keep your data on your device. Here's what that means in practice:
- Student data — task responses, scores, and class lists are stored locally in a database on your machine. None of this is transmitted to us or any third party.
- Student names — if you use the automatic name recognition feature, names are read from scanned papers using on-device machine learning (Windows ML). This processing happens entirely on your device.
- Student email addresses — if you use the email results feature, student email addresses are stored locally as part of your class records. They are transmitted only to your SMTP server when you send results, not to us.
We don't run analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting that could transmit data from your machine. We don't sell data. We don't have data to sell.
3a. Email sending and SMTP credentials
GroupMark can send student results directly via email using an SMTP server you configure. To use this feature, you provide your SMTP server address, port, username, and password. GroupMark uses these credentials to connect to your mail server and send results. It does not route email through our servers, and we never have access to your credentials.
How credentials are stored: Your SMTP username and password are stored in your operating system's secure credential store (Windows Credential Manager). They are never written to disk in plain text. GroupMark retrieves them only when sending email, and they are not accessible to other applications.
We recommend using an app-specific password rather than your main email account password. Gmail, Outlook, and most other providers support app-specific passwords. They give GroupMark access to send email without exposing your primary account credentials, and they can be revoked independently if needed.
GroupMark does not log sent emails or retain any record of what was sent or to whom, beyond the student and submission records already stored in your local database.
4. AI-assisted features
GroupMark includes optional AI features that can suggest question regions, marking criteria, and topic tags for your tasks. These features are opt-in. They won't activate unless you enable them in Settings.
When you use these features, your blank task template (the questions, without any student responses or identifying information) is sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate suggestions. You review, adjust, and approve the results before they're used for marking.
No student work is ever sent externally. AI features operate only on the blank template you've created.
AI-generated suggestions are a starting point, not a marking decision. All marking remains under your control.
Fair use. The AI features are free and run on a shared service with per-device limits. They're meant for normal, individual classroom use. If usage is excessive, automated, or looks designed to abuse the service, we may rate-limit, suspend, or block access to keep it available and affordable for everyone.
Availability. The AI features are provided as is, and we may change, limit, or withdraw them at any time (for example, if the running costs become unsustainable). The rest of GroupMark doesn't depend on them and keeps working either way. If we ever discontinue the built-in AI service, we plan to add an option to use your own API key, so you can keep using these features at your own cost.
5. Acceptable use
GroupMark is intended for use by teachers and educators for legitimate assessment purposes. You agree not to use it in ways that would harm students or violate their rights, such as sharing student results with unauthorised parties or using exported data in ways that breach your school's privacy obligations.
We reserve the right to revoke a licence if we have reasonable grounds to believe it's being used in a way that causes harm or violates these terms.
6. Intellectual property
GroupMark and everything in it (the code, design, and branding) belongs to us. These terms don't transfer any ownership to you; they give you a licence to use the software.
Your data is yours. The tasks you create, the classes you set up, and the results you generate belong to you. We make no claim over any of it.
7. Warranties and liability
GroupMark is provided in good faith and we work hard to keep it reliable, but we can't guarantee it will be error-free or available at all times. To the extent permitted by law, we provide it "as is" without warranties beyond those required by Australian Consumer Law.
We're not liable for indirect losses arising from your use of GroupMark, such as marking data lost to a software bug. We strongly recommend keeping backups of your GroupMark data folder.
Our total liability to you in any circumstance is capped at the amount you've paid for GroupMark in the 12 months preceding the issue.
8. Australian Consumer Law
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law. If GroupMark fails to meet a consumer guarantee under the ACL (for example, if it's not fit for the purpose described), you're entitled to a remedy. These terms don't change that.
9. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms from time to time. If we make significant changes, we'll note the change at the top of this page. Continuing to use GroupMark after that point means you've accepted the updated terms.
The "last updated" date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.
10. Contact
Questions about these terms, or anything else? Email us at hello@groupmark.com.au. We're a small team and we read everything.
These terms are governed by the laws of South Australia, Australia.