Acceptable Use Policy

What this policy covers

Stride uses AI in two places: the AI Coach, which answers questions about your own practice results, and AI feedback, which estimates bands and comments on your Writing and Speaking answers. This policy sets out what those features are for, what you may not use them for, and how the content they generate may be used. It applies to everyone who uses Stride and forms part of our Terms of use.

What the AI features are for

• Preparing for the IELTS test: understanding your results, practising, and improving your English.
• Getting feedback on answers you wrote or spoke yourself in a Stride practice test.
• Asking the Coach about your performance, a question type, or what to practise next.

What you must not do

You must not use the AI Coach, AI feedback or any other part of Stride to create, request, submit or share:

• Sexual or explicit content. This is prohibited in anything you send to the AI Coach, in any answer you submit for feedback, and in anything the AI generates. It includes sexually explicit text, erotic role-play, and requests for such material presented as an example, a test or a writing exercise.
• Content that sexualises children in any way. We report this where the law requires it.
• Hateful, harassing, threatening or violent content, or content that promotes harm to yourself or others.
• Content that is illegal, or that helps someone break the law.
• Someone else's personal information, or material you have no right to share.

You also must not:

• Use Stride to produce essays, letters or speaking scripts to hand in as your own work for an exam, a course or an application, or to sell or supply to anyone else. Stride gives feedback on your work; it is not an essay-writing service.
• Present a Stride band estimate or AI feedback as an official IELTS result, an examiner's mark or a certificate.
• Try to get around these rules or the safeguards that enforce them, for example with prompts designed to make the AI ignore its instructions.
• Use automated tools to send requests, copy the service's content in bulk, or resell access to it.
• Use the AI features for anything unrelated to IELTS preparation or English study.

How you may use what the AI generates

• Feedback, band estimates, rewrites of your own sentences and Coach replies are for your personal study.
• You may keep them, and you may show them to a teacher or tutor who is helping you prepare.
• You may not sell them, publish them as official results or examiner opinions, or use them to mislead anyone about your ability or your score.
• AI output can be wrong. Band scores in Stride are estimates for practice, not official IELTS results, and Stride is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge.

How we enforce this

• Messages to the AI Coach are checked before they reach the AI model. A message asking for sexual or explicit content is refused and is not answered.
• The AI is instructed to stay on IELTS preparation and never to produce sexual, explicit, hateful or illegal content, including when it is marking a submitted answer. It will not quote or rewrite such content if it appears in an answer.
• Generated replies are checked again, and a reply that breaks this policy is withdrawn.
• If you break this policy we may remove content, limit your use of the AI features, or suspend or close your account. Serious or repeated breaches can lead to closure without a refund.

Reporting a problem

If the AI produces something inappropriate, or you see Stride being misused, email support@strideielts.com and tell us what happened. We reply within 3 business days.