Privacy policy

Marginal is an independent study tool for AS and A Level Economics (9708). It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, connected to, or in partnership with Cambridge Assessment International Education, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, or the University of Cambridge, and no data you give us is shared with them.

Marking runs on artificial intelligence, which means it can be wrong — marks, feedback and anything read off a photographed script included. The terms & conditions set out what that means for how far you should rely on an output; this policy covers what happens to your data.

• Account details — your name and email address.
• The work you submit — essays, typed or pasted answers, photographs of handwritten scripts and the text lifted from them, diagrams, and the questions you attach them to.
• What the tool produced — marks, AO breakdowns, examiner notes and rewrite plans, kept so you can go back to them.
• Usage information — which features were used and when, plus basic technical logs needed to keep the service running and secure.

We do not ask for anything we do not need, and there is no reason to put personal details about yourself or anyone else inside an essay.

To mark your work and show you the result; to keep your history so progress is visible; to let separate authorised teams hold the marking standard steady; and to keep the service working, secure and free of misuse.

We do not use your work to advertise to you, and we do not sell it to anyone.

You, always. Your private drafts, in-progress essays and practice attempts are only visible to you.

Exemplar Showcase: Essays achieving distinction marks (8/8 for 8-mark, >10 for 12-mark, or >15 for 20-mark) are automatically made viewable in the Exemplar Showcase for peer revision and academic standards benchmarking. Author identities are strictly anonymised (only initials or Anonymous are shown). Only platform administrators have the authority to curate, add model responses, or hide/remove essays from the showcase.

Your class teachers, while you are enrolled in their class, can view the learning activity needed to support you. This includes essay questions and marks, AO breakdowns, MCQ results and topic performance, and Live Examiner progress. Before joining a class, you must explicitly acknowledge this access. Leaving the class removes that teacher’s classroom access to your report.

Separate authorised teams — the people who calibrate the marking standard and review it for quality and safety — hold special access rights granted by us for that purpose. Those rights are limited to what the work requires, are logged, and are withdrawn when the work ends. Students never hold them, and calibration reviewers see only what a review needs.

We access individual work only where it is needed to fix a fault you have reported, to investigate misuse, or where the law requires it.

Marking runs through third-party AI model providers. Your essay text — and, for handwritten scripts, the image and the text extracted from it — is sent to those providers so it can be marked, along with the relevant extracts from Marginal's approved knowledge base.

We use providers on terms that do not permit your work to be used to train their models. The mark, the AO split and the notes come back to us and are stored with your essay. What comes back is generated by a model and can be inaccurate — treat it as a second opinion and check anything that matters.

Work and marks are kept while your account is open, so your history stays useful across a two-year course. Delete an essay and it goes, along with its mark. Close your account and we delete the work associated with it, other than anything we must keep to meet a legal obligation, and backups which age out on their own schedule.

Retired knowledge-base material and calibration exemplars are removed according to the platform's retention policy.

You can ask us to:

• show you what we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete an essay, or your whole account;
• send you a copy of your work in a form you can keep.

Requests should come directly from the email address on your account. We answer within a reasonable period, and we do not charge for it.

Marginal sets the cookies it needs to keep you signed in and to remember your theme. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party tracking pixels on this site.

Marginal is built for students taking an AS and A Level Economics (9708) course. Where a student is below the age at which they can consent for themselves, a parent or guardian must give that consent. If you believe a younger child has an account without that permission, contact us and we will remove it.

The date at the top of this page shows the current version. Material changes are announced on the site before they take effect.

Questions, requests and complaints can be sent through our help and contact form. For account or privacy requests, use the email address connected to your account. The terms & conditions cover everything else about using the service.