Privacy Policy

High Score Math is a math learning platform used by teachers and their students. We collect only what we need to run the platform, we never sell student data, we never show ads, and schools stay in control of what happens to their students' information.

High Score Math is owned and operated by Nathan Charlton, a middle school math teacher. The platform is hosted at highscoremath.com. Contact us through the contact page for anything privacy-related.

• Teachers who create an account.
• Students whose teacher has added them to a class on High Score Math.
• Visitors who browse the public marketing site.

Schools and teachers decide to use High Score Math on behalf of their students. When a teacher creates an account and enrolls students in a class, we treat that school as our authorizing customer.

• Under FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), we operate as a "school official with a legitimate educational interest" — meaning we can hold student educational records only for the educational purpose the school hired us for.
• Under COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), when a school directs the use of our platform for students under 13, the school may provide the required consent on behalf of parents. We rely on that authority; we do not collect that consent directly from parents.
• A student may create an account by signing in with a Google account, but the account is inactive — no Student Data is collected — until the student joins a class using a class code issued by their teacher. Meaningful data collection only begins once a teacher has authorized the student's participation in a class.

"Student Data" means any information that identifies a specific student, was created by a student on the platform, or was recorded about a student's activity on the platform. This includes:

• Name and Google account email (used to log in)
• The classes and teachers a student is enrolled with
• Answers submitted on practice, assessments, exit tickets, and live games
• Scores, mastery levels, coins, achievements, cosmetic inventory, league tier
• Activity timestamps (when a student practiced, submitted, or joined a class)

• Name and Google account email (used to log in)
• The school and state you teach at (required at signup; used to organize accounts by school and district)
• The classes, assignments, and preferences you create on the platform
• Basic technical information required to run the site (see "Technical data" below)

We deliberately do not collect any of the following, from anyone:

• Home addresses, phone numbers, or dates of birth
• Precise location or GPS coordinates
• Photographs or biometric information (a teacher's optional camera capture of student handwritten work is uploaded to the teacher's own class only — see "Student work uploads" below)
• Anything not directly needed for the educational function of the platform

Student Data is used only to:

• Show students their assignments, scores, and progress
• Show teachers their students' scores, mastery levels, and activity
• Run the arcade progression features that engage students (coins, chests, achievements, league tier) — see "In-app economy" below
• Keep the platform working, secure, and free of abuse

• We never sell or rent Student Data (or any other user data) to anyone, for any purpose, ever.
• We never show ads. The platform is ad-free for all users.
• We never use Student Data to train AI models, ours or a third party's.
• We never build a public profile of a student. Students can be seen by their own teachers and classmates in the context of a class; there is no public-facing student profile and no cross-teacher student visibility.

A teacher may enable an "Upload your work" option on an assignment, which lets students attach photos of handwritten work. Those photos are uploaded to Azure Blob Storage, visible only to that student's teacher, and automatically deleted at the end of each school year (July 1 in the U.S.) or on school-initiated deletion request, whichever comes first.

Students are responsible for the content they upload, and by uploading, they agree that the content is their own math work and does not violate our Terms of Service. Teachers can remove any uploaded photo from their class at any time. Uploaded content that violates our Terms may be removed by us and may result in the student's access being suspended.

High Score Math includes an in-app arcade economy — students earn coins for practicing, spend them on treasure chests, and collect cosmetic avatars, banners, items, and titles for their profile. Some cosmetics are rare and drop from chests randomly. Because this involves virtual goods for minors, we disclose the following:

• Cosmetics are purely decorative. Coins, chests, and collectibles exist to make practice fun and to encourage engagement. They do not affect a student's grades, mastery levels, assignments, or the math content they see.
• Virtual currency has no real-world value. Coins and gems can only be earned through platform activity. They cannot be purchased with real money, transferred between students, sold, or converted to anything of value outside the platform.
• Treasure chest odds are published. Each chest has a fixed probability of yielding items of each rarity tier (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary). Current odds are shown next to each chest in the store.
• Cosmetics are non-transferable. Items earned by a student stay with that student's account and cannot be traded to another student.

Students earn a "League tier" (Iron through Legendary) based on their coins earned, accuracy, and consistency during a season. Tier thresholds may be calibrated by looking at overall system-wide performance across all students, so that (for example) reaching Legendary reflects roughly the top slice of active students that season. We disclose the following about this system:

• Students never see other students' rankings. A student can see their own tier and their own progress toward the next tier. They cannot see a leaderboard, another student's tier, or another student's name in the context of the league.
• Names are never exposed in rankings. System-wide calculations are used only to compute the tier thresholds; individual students are not identified to one another anywhere in the league system.

During graded assessments (and optionally during practice), the platform records when a student switches away from the browser tab and how many times. This "focus loss" count is visible to the teacher on that student's submission, and, when the teacher enables it, applies a small coin penalty during practice. We disclose this so that:

• Teachers can address possible academic dishonesty through their own school's process, and
• Students and families understand that basic assessment integrity is monitored.

We do not use focus-loss data for any purpose beyond showing it to the student's teacher in that class.

High Score Math calculates a student's mastery of each math standard automatically based on that student's answers over time. This is an automated calculation that produces the mastery levels shown on the teacher dashboard.

• The teacher controls the inputs: the standards and skills in their curriculum set, which sources of practice are counted (regular practice, assessments, exit tickets, live games), and where the mastery band cutoffs sit.
• Students and parents with questions about how a mastery level was determined should first ask the teacher, who is the authoritative source for that student's mastery configuration.

When you use the site, our hosting platform automatically records basic technical information used to run and secure the service: your IP address, browser type, pages requested, error logs, and similar server-side signals. This information is retained for a short window for operational and security purposes only and is never combined with Student Data for a commercial purpose.

We do not use third-party analytics on any student-facing page. We do not use behavioral advertising cookies. The site does use cookies that are strictly necessary to keep you signed in.

High Score Math uses a small number of vendors to host and operate the platform. They receive only the data needed to perform their function and are contractually required to keep it confidential. See the subprocessors page for the current list.

• Active student accounts: retained across school years so students can access their own progress history and teachers can compare year over year.
• Student work photo uploads: deleted at the end of each school year (July 1 in the U.S.) or on school-initiated deletion request, whichever comes first.
• Deletion requests: we honor school-initiated deletion requests promptly. Some data may remain in encrypted backups for a period afterward for operational recovery purposes, and is purged when those backups age out.

Schools, parents, and adult users can request deletion of a student's data. Contact us through the contact page with the student's name, teacher, and class code.

User data is stored on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in the United States, protected in transit by TLS and at rest by Azure-managed encryption. Access to production data is limited to the operator (Nathan Charlton) using authentication provided by Microsoft Azure. If we ever discover a security incident that has affected user data, we will notify the affected schools and users promptly and describe what happened, what was involved, what we are doing about it, and what those affected can do.

If High Score Math is ever acquired, merged, or otherwise changes ownership, we will not transfer Student Data to a new owner unless that new owner agrees to the same or stronger privacy protections described in this policy. We will notify schools in advance and give them the opportunity to delete their students' data before any transfer takes effect.

We may update this policy from time to time. Substantive changes will be announced on the site (a banner or in-app notice) with at least 30 days' notice before they take effect, and the "Last updated" date at the top of this page will change. Continued use of the platform after the effective date means you accept the updated policy.

Questions or requests related to this policy can be sent through the contact page.