Pscholar: Psychiatry education

This policy explains what Pscholar records about you, why, who can see it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past.

Last updated: 13 October 2026.

1. Who is responsible for your data

Pscholar (pscholar.net) is operated by Pscholar, an independent project based in Saudi Arabia and currently in a trial run. We are the party responsible for the personal data described here. Contact us about anything in this policy at support@pscholar.net.

2. What we collect

a. What you give us when you register

• Your first and last name.
• Your email address.
• Your username and a one-way encrypted form of your password. We never see your password itself.
• Your residency level (R1–R4, fellow, and so on), and any other profile detail you choose to fill in.

b. What you tell us in Pscholar

• What you are working on, and an exam date if you enter one.
• The settings you choose when you build a test: topics, levels, question types, number of questions, mode, timer.
• Problems you report on a question or a clinical station, including anything you write in the report.
• Questions you flag, and any note you save on a question.

c. What we record while you practise

This is the part that makes Pscholar useful, so it is worth being precise. For every question you are shown, we record:

• which question it was, which version of it, and its topic, level and type;
• whether you had ever seen it before;
• the option you first chose, the option you ended on, and how many times you changed your mind;
• which options you crossed out;
• whether you got it right;
• how long it was on your screen, and when.

We also keep a log of each action on the test screen — showing a question, choosing an option, submitting, flagging, crossing out, pausing, resuming, finishing — with its time. This is what lets us rebuild a report later, measure how hard a question really is, and investigate a complaint about a question or a score.

At a clinical station we record which stations were drawn, when each part started and ended, the notes and answers you type, and each checklist item as marked, with when and by whom.

If you invite a partner — an examiner or an actor — into a clinical session, they join with a code and need no account. We record the name they type, their role, what they do in the session, the marks they give and any problem they report with a station, and a cookie on their device holds their seat. Their name is shown to you and on your results.

If you make a study plan, we keep its name, the books, dates and rest days you chose, the name and page count of any book you add yourself, the timetable made from them, and the days you tick as done. Deleting a plan deletes all of it. If you share a plan by a code, anyone who has the code can copy the plan as you made it (its books, chapters and dates): not your name, and not what you have ticked. You can stop sharing at any time.

d. What the system records automatically

• Standard web server and application logs: your IP address, the pages you requested, the time, and your browser's user-agent string.
• A session cookie so you stay logged in, and cookies that remember your preferences (for example dark mode). We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not run third-party analytics or advertising trackers.
• Email we send you: account confirmation, password reset, any reply from support, and, only if you turn them on, a reminder on the study days of your plan.
• On the public pages, a count per day of how many visitors open the landing page, try a sample question or start creating an account. Only the daily totals are kept: no cookie is set for this, and nothing about the visitor is recorded.
• If you ask to be told when Pscholar opens, the email address you leave on the welcome page. It is used for one email, on the day Pscholar opens, and for nothing else, and it is deleted once that email has been sent. To have it removed sooner, write to us.

3. Why we hold it, and on what basis

Why	Basis
To give you an account and run the service you asked for	Performance of our agreement with you (the Terms of Use)
To show you your own results, history and reports, and to let you resume a test	Performance of our agreement with you
To keep the service secure, to investigate misuse, and to keep records of consent	Our legitimate interest in running a safe service, and our legal obligations
To find and fix bad questions, and to decide what to write next	Our legitimate interest in the quality of the material
To produce aggregated, de-identified statistics and comparisons	Our legitimate interest in a useful product, with individuals not identifiable
Research on individual-level records, or contacting you about a study	Your separate, explicit consent, which you may withdraw at any time

4. Who can see your results

This is the promise Pscholar is built on, so it is stated plainly:

• Your individual results are visible to you and to the site administrator. Nobody else — no other user, no supervisor, no programme director, no hospital, no examination body — can see your scores, your answers or your history.
• We do not report you to anyone. We will never tell your programme, your supervisor or your employer that you use Pscholar, or how you did.
• Other users see only averages across groups, and only once a group is large enough that no individual can be identified from it. Pscholar keeps a counter for this and holds the comparisons back until the numbers are there.
• Where an average is shown, each person counts once, so no single heavy user shapes it.
• If you invite a partner into a clinical session, they see that session's stations while it runs and the marks they give you — nothing else of yours, and nothing once the session ends.

The only exceptions are the ordinary ones: where you ask us to share something, where we must disclose it by law or to a competent authority, or where it is necessary to investigate a serious breach of the Terms of Use.

5. Our suppliers

We keep this list short on purpose.

• Hosting. Pscholar runs on servers rented from a commercial web-hosting provider. Your data is stored there. Those servers are located outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which means your data is transferred and stored abroad; we choose providers that contract to keep it confidential and secure.
• Email. Account and support email is sent through our hosting provider's mail service.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, recruiters, insurers, employers or training programmes. We do not use it to train anyone else's artificial-intelligence model, and we do not send it to a third-party model to be trained on.

6. Research

Pscholar exists partly to answer questions that matter to psychiatry education: which topics people find hardest, how learning curves look over time, whether a question actually discriminates. Research on this is a stated purpose of the site, and it is split into two levels.

Without any extra consent from you, we use aggregated and de-identified data — figures about groups, never about an identifiable person — to improve Pscholar and to produce and publish statistics, including in academic work. Published figures always cover groups large enough that no individual can be identified.

With your separate, explicit consent, we may also use your de-identified individual-level records in research studies, and invite you to take part in a survey or interview. That consent:

• is optional — Pscholar works exactly the same if you decline;
• is recorded with a date, so there is a clear record of what you agreed to;
• can be withdrawn at any time, which stops any further use of your records in research;
• never allows your name or email address to appear in any publication or dataset shared outside Pscholar;
• does not replace ethics approval. Any study that needs approval from a research ethics committee will have it before that study starts.

You will be asked about this separately, and you can change your answer whenever you like.

7. How long we keep it

• While your account is open: we keep your account details and your practice record, because that record is the service — your history, your progress and your reports depend on it.
• If you delete your account: we delete your account details and your practice record. What remains is aggregated and de-identified data that cannot be traced back to you — for example the fact that a question was answered correctly 62% of the time. That cannot be unpicked into your records, and it does not identify you.
• Server logs: kept for a limited period for security and troubleshooting, then deleted or overwritten in the ordinary course.
• Records of consent (which policy version you accepted and when): kept for as long as we may need to show what you agreed to.

8. Your rights

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy of it;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your account and your data;
• stop using your data for a particular purpose, or withdraw a consent you gave;
• explain anything in this policy that is not clear.

The quickest route is to write to support@pscholar.net from the email address on your account. We will answer within 30 days. There is no charge. Deleting your account is free and permanent, and we will not argue with you about it.

If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us first — we would rather fix it. You also have the right to complain to the competent data protection authority in your country.

9. Security

Pscholar is served over an encrypted connection, passwords are stored only as one-way hashes, and access to the database is limited to the administrator. We take backups so that your record is not lost. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise: if a breach affects your data, we will tell you and the relevant authority as the law requires.

10. Not for children

Pscholar is for doctors and medical students aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect data about anyone under 18. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we will remove it.

11. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will ask you to read and accept the new version the next time you log in, and the previous version stays on record.

12. Contact

support@pscholar.net — for any question, request or complaint about your data.