Privacy Policy

Merit Learning ("Merit"), operated by Merit Learning, helps high school students learn their classes, AP courses, and the SAT. Merit is free for students. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. We don't sell personal information and we don't show ads.

Account: your name, email, password (stored hashed) or Google or Apple sign-in, and your birth month and year (to confirm you're 13 or older). Learning activity: courses, lessons you watch, saves, helpful votes, topics you mark understood, learning plan progress, Exam Sprint answers, and messages you send to Merit AI. Calendar: if you connect one, the school events on it and the private link you gave us (kept private to your account). Location: the city, state, or ZIP you enter to find tutors. Tutoring: bookings and messages between students and tutors; session payments are handled by Stripe, and we keep a record of the payment, not your card number. Uploads: videos and descriptions teachers and tutors publish, which are public on Merit. Usage: pages you visit on Merit, the device type, the country (from your connection, not stored as an IP address), and the site that referred you, tied to a random ID in a first-party cookie.

To run Merit: build your learning plan, rank lessons, personalize practice, answer your questions, handle tutoring bookings, prevent abuse, and improve the service. Aggregated, anonymous engagement helps rank lessons for everyone.

When you connect a school calendar (Canvas, Schoology, Blackbaud, Google Classroom, or any calendar link or file), you choose to share it with Merit. Merit reads event titles and dates to find your quizzes, tests, and assignments and match them to lessons. It never sees your grades, never changes your calendar, and never shares calendar data with anyone. Disconnect at any time from My schedule and Merit deletes the link and the events it saved.

Merit doesn't receive education records from schools; students share their own calendars. If a school or district wants to provide Merit to its students, we'll sign a student data privacy agreement and act as a "school official" under FERPA, using student data only for the school's purposes. contact the Merit team from your account settings to set one up.

If you choose "Connect Google Calendar," Merit gets read-only access to your Google calendars. Merit reads event titles, dates, and descriptions to find your tests, quizzes, and assignments and match them to lessons, and keeps only those items. Merit never changes your calendars, never shares this data, and never uses it for ads. Merit's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. You can disconnect at any time from My schedule, which deletes Merit's access, or from your Google account settings.

Merit uses its own cookies to keep you signed in and to count visits (a random visitor ID). Our analytics are first-party: they're stored in Merit's own database, not sent to advertising or analytics companies. We don't store IP addresses for analytics.

Merit uses YouTube API Services to find, describe, and show YouTube lessons. Lessons play in YouTube's embedded player (in privacy-enhanced mode) or on YouTube, where Google's Privacy Policy applies. Merit doesn't access your YouTube or Google account. We store public video details (title, channel, thumbnail, length, view count) to build lesson pages, refresh them regularly, and remove videos that are no longer public. If you signed in with Google, you can revoke Merit's access at any time from Google security settings.

With service providers that run Merit for us (for example hosting, database, payments for tutoring, and AI model providers that process Merit AI requests under their own privacy terms and do not use them to train models on your data where that option is available). With a tutor you book or message: your name, email, and message. We share information if the law requires it. We never sell it.

We keep your data while your account is active. You can clear your history in your library, disconnect your calendar at any time, and ask us to delete your account and its data, with or without an account, by contacting us below.

Merit is for students 13 and older. Signup asks for a birth month and year and doesn't create an account for anyone younger, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, contact the Merit team from your account settings and we will delete it.

To exercise your privacy rights (access, correction, or deletion) or ask a question, contact the Merit team from your account settings. You don't need an account to reach us.