Terms & conditions

These terms are the agreement between you and Marginal (“Marginal”, “we”, “us”) covering your use of this website and the marking tools behind it. Using the site or creating an account means you accept them. If you are using Marginal through your school, your school's own rules apply on top of these terms, and where a school rule is stricter, the school rule wins.

Marginal is an independent study tool built for AS and A Level Economics (9708). It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, connected to, approved by, or in partnership with Cambridge Assessment International Education, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, or the University of Cambridge. The syllabus name and code are used only to describe the course this tool supports. Nothing produced here is an official Cambridge product, service, mark, or grade.

You need an account to submit work for marking. Keep your sign-in details to yourself: anything done through your account is treated as done by you, and sharing an account with another student makes the marking useless for both of you.

Student accounts cannot upload official content, change roles, manage prompts, or alter the marking standard. Those capabilities are reserved for explicitly authorised administrators.

If you are under the age at which you can agree to terms on your own where you live, you may use Marginal only with the permission of a parent, guardian, or your school, and through an account your school has set up for you.

Different parts of Marginal are open to different people, and those levels are deliberately separate. A student account submits work and sees its own history. An administrator account manages approved material and the question bank. Student accounts cannot calibrate the marking.

Calibration — setting and holding the standard the marking is measured against, and confirming the marks attached to anchor essays — is carried out only by separate authorised teams granted special access rights for that purpose. Those rights are issued and withdrawn by us, are limited to what the work requires, are logged, and are not available to students, however an account is set up.

Trying to obtain, share, or use access rights you have not been granted is a breach of these terms and grounds for closing the account.

Every mark Marginal produces is an estimate: a second opinion that shows its reasoning and cites the mark scheme it used, so you can check it and disagree with it. It is not an official Cambridge mark, it does not predict your grade, and it carries no weight in any qualification. Your teacher's mark is still the one that counts.

We do not promise that a mark is correct, that two runs on the same essay will agree exactly, or that using Marginal will improve your results. Marking is a judgement, and an automated judgement can be wrong in ways a person's would not be. Treat a mark you disagree with as a question worth taking to your teacher rather than as a verdict.

Marginal runs on artificial intelligence, and AI makes mistakes. A mark can come out too high or too low. A mark-scheme point can be missed, or credited when it was not earned. Feedback can misread what you wrote, misquote the syllabus, misread handwriting or a diagram, or state something wrong with complete confidence. The same essay marked twice may not produce the same mark.

That is a limitation of the technology rather than a fault we expect to eliminate, so treat every output as a draft opinion to be checked, not as a fact. Check anything that matters against the syllabus, the mark scheme, and your teacher before relying on it. We do not warrant that the service is accurate, complete, current, or fit for any particular purpose, and we are not responsible for the consequences of relying on an output without checking it.

The essay generator exists so you can see what a full-mark answer looks like after you have written your own. Submitting a Marginal-generated essay — in whole or in part — as your own work for homework, coursework, a mock, or any assessed task is a breach of these terms, and almost certainly a breach of your school's academic honesty policy and of Cambridge's regulations.

You are responsible for what you hand in. If your school asks us whether work submitted under a school account was generated, we may tell them.

You keep every intellectual property right you already had in the essays, answers, notes and photographs of scripts you upload. You give us only the permission needed to run the service: to store your work, process it in order to mark it, and show it back to you.

To foster collaborative academic excellence across the Cambridge 9708 community, student essays that attain top-band distinction marks (specifically 8/8 for 8-mark questions, >10 for 12-mark questions, or >15 for 20-mark questions) are automatically featured in the Exemplar Showcase. Showcased essays are strictly anonymised (displaying only author initials or anonymous markers) so that students can study master-level reasoning, AO breakdowns and examiner commentaries.

Platform administrators retain full editorial moderation rights to curate, add official model exemplars, or remove essays from the showcase at any time. We do not sell your work, and we do not use your essays to advertise to third parties. How data is stored and how to request deletion are set out in the privacy policy.

Marginal marks against documents uploaded by authorised administrators — syllabus copies, coursebooks, past mark schemes and examiner reports. Anyone uploading material confirms they are entitled to use it this way and remains responsible for it.

Uploaded material is used to ground marking and is not exposed to student accounts unless it has been explicitly published for learning use.

Please don't:

• upload anyone else's work as if it were your own, or anyone else's personal information;
• upload material you have no right to share;
• try to break, scrape, overload, or reverse-engineer the service, or get at another user's work;
• use the service to produce material that is unlawful, abusive, or designed to deceive an examiner;
• resell access, or use it to build a competing marking service.

We can suspend or close an account that does any of these, and we will tell the school where a school account is involved.

Marginal is offered as it is. Features change, sometimes quickly, and the service may be unavailable for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. We do not guarantee uptime, and we would not rely on it the night before a deadline either.

We may change, add, or withdraw features. Where a change materially reduces what an account can do, we will give notice through the site.

To the extent the law allows, Marginal is not liable for grades, results, academic consequences, lost work, or any indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the service — including any loss arising from an inaccurate, incomplete, or missing mark or piece of feedback. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Because the marks are estimates, decisions that matter — what to revise, what to submit, what grade to predict — should rest with you and your teacher, not with the tool.

You can stop using Marginal at any time and ask for your account and its work to be deleted. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or where a school closes its own account.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. If you are using Marginal as a consumer somewhere else, this does not take away rights you have under the law of the country you live in.

We update these terms when the service changes. The date at the top of this page always shows the current version, and material changes are announced on the site before they take effect. Continuing to use Marginal after that means you accept the updated terms.

Questions about these terms, account deletion requests, partnership enquiries and reports of misuse can be sent directly through our help and contact form. You do not need to contact a school first.

If something here is unclear, ask. A term you had to guess at is a term we wrote badly.