Safety for families

An account needs a working email address, confirmed by clicking a link we send. We ask everyone to confirm they are 13 or older when they sign up.

We should be straight about that last part: it is a question, not a check. We have no way to verify anyone’s age. If you believe an account belongs to someone under 13, email us and we will remove it.

By default a student is shown by first name only. They can choose to show a full name or a preferred name instead. Names are screened when they are set.

The full legal name on an account is visible to CREX admins, not to other students.

This is the part most worth knowing. There are no direct messages on CREX. There is no inbox, no chat, no way for one person to contact another privately through the site at all.

Every interaction is a comment on an essay, in the open, where it can be read, reported and removed. An adult cannot start a private conversation with a student here, because the site has nowhere to hold one.

A student can post an essay anonymously. Other readers and commenters then see no name on it, and nothing in the essay itself points back to anything else they have posted. One thing to know: comments are never anonymous, so if the author replies to feedback on their own anonymous essay, their name appears under it. We say so next to the comment box.

Background tags — first-generation, rural, and others in that group — are hidden on an anonymous essay, because together they can point back to one student at a small school.

CREX admins can still see who wrote it. That is deliberate: reports and abuse cannot be dealt with otherwise. Looking at who wrote an anonymous essay is recorded.

Current student — confirmed a school email address by entering a code we sent to it, at a recognised school domain, or one an admin has approved.

Past student — someone who has already been through applications and is now in college or graduated.

Professional — confirmed a work email address and a public professional profile, both checked by an admin.

Professionals here give feedback on writing. They do not evaluate applicants, and nothing said on CREX has any bearing on a real application. CREX is not affiliated with any college, university or admissions office.

Essays and comments are screened automatically for harassment, hate and sexual content before they appear.

Anything scoring as sexual content involving minors is held and not publicly readable until an admin has reviewed it. A comment that fails the check is held the same way. Other things the check flags stay visible and go to an admin to look at, so a flag is a prompt for a person rather than an automatic removal.

Strong language is masked for readers, so an essay that uses it is still readable without the words being printed.

Essays that touch on self-harm are handled differently on purpose. A student writing about their own experience of it is doing the thing this site is for, and the application prompts practically ask for it. That does not go to an admin. The student is quietly shown support resources instead, and nobody else reads it because of that.

Every essay and every comment has a report button, and reports go to a person.

A student can block another user. An admin can stop an account from commenting, and does so automatically after repeated confirmed violations.

If a student’s essay is held or their account is limited, they can appeal it and a person will read the appeal. Every action an admin takes is logged.

There are no ads on CREX. We do not sell anything about anyone. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies — the only cookie is the one that keeps a student signed in.

We do count page views, so we know how many people the site reaches. It is aggregate and cookieless, and nothing it records is tied to an account. Essay addresses are reduced before they are counted: the figures show that an essay page was read, never which essay. There are no advertising trackers of any kind.

Essays carry an instruction telling search engines not to index them, so a well-behaved search engine will not list a student’s essay in results.

Copying and printing an essay are blocked by default. An author can turn that off for their own essay if they want to.

No automatic check catches everything. Some things will get through, and when they do, what finds them is a person reporting them.

We cannot verify anyone’s age, and we cannot guarantee that everyone here is who they say they are beyond the badges described above. CREX is run by a very small team, not a moderation department, and it is not an emergency service. If someone is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number first.

What we can say is that there is nowhere private for an adult to approach a student here, that reports reach a person, and that we would rather hear about something small than not hear about something serious.

Parents, guardians and counselors are welcome to write to us directly at contact@collegecrex.org. You do not need an account, and you can ask us to take down an essay.