Terms of Service

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. Most people here are 16 to 18 and working on Common App or UC applications.

If you are under 18, please read these terms with a parent or guardian. Posting an essay means strangers can read it and write comments about it, and that is worth understanding before you start.

We ask everyone to confirm they are 13 or older when they sign up, but we do not verify anyone's age beyond that.

We do not knowingly allow accounts for anyone under 13. If we find out an account belongs to someone under 13, we remove the account and the data that came with it, including their essays and the personal details on the account. If you believe an account belongs to a child under 13 — whether you are their parent, their school, or anyone else — tell us at the contact form or contact@collegecrex.org and we will act on it. You do not need to prove anything to report it.

You need an email address and a password. Keep your password to yourself — anything done from your account is treated as done by you.

One account per person. Don't impersonate someone else.

You keep the copyright to everything you write here. Posting an essay does not transfer any ownership of it to us.

By posting, you give CREX a limited licence to store your essay and show it on the site in the way you chose — publicly, anonymously, or to people with the private link. That is the whole of it. The licence exists so the site can display your work, it is not exclusive, we do not sell your writing or license it to anyone else, and you can revoke it at any time by deleting the essay or your account, at which point it ends.

Post writing that is yours, or that the person who wrote it has said you may post. If you post a friend’s essay, say so in the feedback questions, name them only if they want to be named, and take it down if they ask. You are responsible for whatever is posted from your account. Don’t post anything taken from a book, a website, or another person without that permission, and don’t include other people’s private information — real names, contact details, or anything identifying a third party who has not agreed to it.

Each essay has one of three settings:

• Public — listed in the feed with your display name.
• Anonymous — listed in the feed with your name, your badge and any identifying tags hidden from other readers.
• Private link — not listed anywhere; only someone with the exact link can open it.

New essays are set to Anonymous unless you change it.

One thing we want to be straightforward about: anonymous is not anonymous to us. Site administrators can see who wrote an anonymous essay, because handling abuse and takedown requests requires it. Every such look-up is recorded in an internal admin log. Anonymous hides you from other users, not from the people running the site.

Also treat a private link as unlisted rather than secret — anyone you send it to can forward it.

A public or anonymous essay can be read by strangers, and anything a stranger can read they can copy. We take some measures and they are worth knowing exactly:

• Individual essay pages are kept out of search engines, both by our robots.txt and by a noindex instruction on the page itself, so a well-behaved search engine will not index your essay. The feed page itself stays searchable and shows the opening of each public essay, so treat your first couple of sentences as potentially findable.
• Copying, cutting, dragging and printing an essay are switched off for everyone except its author — on by default, and you can allow copying on any essay of yours if you would rather. Selecting text still works for everyone, because that is how readers attach a note to a specific line.
• That makes casual copying harder. It does not make it impossible, and we would rather say so than imply a protection that does not exist: a screenshot, a photograph of the screen, or simply retyping your essay all still work, and nothing we can build will stop them.

So: do not post anything you could not bear to see copied. If you are worried about a specific essay, the private-link setting keeps it off the feed and out of search entirely, and you can share the link with only the people you want.

CREX is not responsible for what a third party does with an essay after reading it, including plagiarism, redistribution, or submitting it as their own work. If you think your essay has been copied, tell us at the contact form or contact@collegecrex.org and we will do what we reasonably can, but we cannot act outside this site.

Essays here belong to the people who wrote them. You may read them and write feedback. You may not copy them, republish them anywhere, or submit any part of someone else's essay as your own work in an application or assignment.

Doing so breaks these terms and is grounds for having your account removed. It is also the single thing most likely to get a real person's college application rejected, so we treat it as seriously as anything else on this list.

The point of this site is useful feedback on writing. Criticism of an essay is welcome. Attacks on the person who wrote it are not.

Specifically, don't post content that:

• harasses, threatens, demeans or sexualises anyone
• is hateful toward people based on who they are
• shares someone else's private information
• is spam, advertising, or an offer to write essays for money
• is illegal

Comments are screened automatically when you post them. Depending on the result, a comment may be published normally, published but flagged for a human to look at, held out of sight pending review, or refused outright.

Anyone can report an essay or comment. Several reports on the same comment will hide it automatically until an administrator reviews it.

An administrator can suspend an account, and repeated confirmed violations do it automatically. A suspended account cannot comment, vote or report; appeals stay open. Suspensions are not permanent bans and you can appeal one from inside the site; an administrator reads the appeal and decides.

Administrators can also remove any essay or comment. We would rather explain a removal than not, but we may act first when something is clearly harmful.

Automated screening is imperfect in both directions. It will occasionally hold back something harmless, and it will occasionally miss something it should have caught. That is why reports and appeals exist.

Some accounts show a badge: a verified current student, a past student, or a verified professional — a counsellor, teacher, professor, admissions reader or tutor. A student badge means the account confirmed a school email address, or gave school details that an administrator accepted. A past-student badge means the same, for someone who has already been through admissions and is now in college or has graduated. A professional badge means the account confirmed a LinkedIn account or a work email address, and gave a public page showing their work — a staff directory, a professional body, or a LinkedIn profile — and an administrator checked both alongside the organisation and role they submitted.

Professionals here — counselors, teachers, professors, admissions readers and tutors — give feedback on your writing. They are not evaluating you as an applicant, and their opinion has no bearing on any admissions decision anywhere. CREX is not affiliated with any college, university or admissions office, and nothing you post here is visible to an admissions committee.

You can remove your own badge at any time from the verification page, and verify again later if you want to.

A badge is a signal, not a guarantee. We are not able to fully verify anyone's identity or credentials, and you should weigh advice accordingly.

You can delete your account at any time from your account settings.

When you do, your essays and the comments on them are removed. Comments you left on other people's essays are kept, but reattributed to a placeholder account called "Deleted User" with your name removed. We keep them because deleting them would tear holes in conversations on other people's work — a reply would stop making sense without the comment it answered.

If you want those comments gone as well, contact us and ask, and tell us which ones.

On your own essay, you can block someone — their comments then disappear from your essays. It hides them from you; it does not remove them for everyone, it does not hide your work from them, and it does not stop them commenting. It is not a report — if someone is breaking the rules, report them as well so an administrator sees it.

Feedback here comes from other users, including strangers and volunteers. It is not professional admissions counselling, and nothing on this site is a prediction or promise about any admissions outcome.

The site is provided as-is. We are a small project and cannot promise it will always be available, or that a technical failure will never lose data. Keep your own copy of anything you care about.

Supporting CREX is optional and buys nothing. It is a gift toward running costs, not a purchase or a subscription: it does not change how your essays are treated, what feedback you get, how moderation decides anything, or what the site owes you. Nobody needs an account to give, and nobody is shown who gave.

CREX is not a registered nonprofit, so a gift is not tax-deductible. Payments are taken by a payment provider on their own site under their terms, and any refund is handled there.

We may suspend or remove an account that breaks these rules, or that puts other users at risk. You can stop using CREX at any time by deleting your account.

If we change these terms in a way that matters, we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing this page.

To report something urgent, request a takedown, ask about an account belonging to a child under 13, or raise anything else: the contact form or contact@collegecrex.org.

TBD — for a lawyer. Three things are deliberately left blank here rather than guessed at: which country's law governs these terms, how disputes get resolved, and the exact wording of the liability and warranty sections. Nothing on this page should be read as standing in for them.