How Study With Lily handles cohort data

What moves from student to instructor

Cohorts on Study With Lily are opt-in. A student only appears on your roster after they redeem your invite code and explicitly confirm enrollment on a consent screen. Once they confirm, you can see:

• The student's name as it appears on their account.
• The student's email address.
• The date they joined the cohort.
• A coarse activity bucket for the cohort as a whole: how many students have registered, how many are active this week, and the typical volume of practice per student. These are cohort-wide aggregates, not per-student scores.

What does not move

Without a separate institutional agreement, instructors do not see:

• Per-student scores or accuracy. You cannot see that Maria got 72 percent and Jamal got 88 percent.
• Question-level activity. You cannot see which specific questions a student answered correctly or incorrectly.
• Time-on-task or session timing tied to an identified student.
• Content a student uploaded to their personal account. Student uploads are private to the student.

This is intentional. Cohort aggregates are enough to tell you whether the class is practicing, without creating a surveillance product.

A note on FERPA

Faculty reasonably ask whether using Study With Lily with a class is FERPA-safe. The honest answer is that FERPA applies to schools and their contracted vendors, not to consumer study tools that students sign up for on their own.

Study With Lily is a direct-to-consumer product. Students create their own accounts, upload their own notes, and practice on their own. An instructor creating a cohort on Study With Lily does not, by itself, make Study With Lily a "school official" under FERPA. That designation requires a written agreement between the institution and the vendor that establishes the vendor as performing an institutional service under direct institutional control.

We do not represent Study With Lily as FERPA-compliant, because in the consumer configuration there is nothing for FERPA to attach to. We also deliberately keep the instructor view limited to roster information and cohort aggregates so that the question rarely needs to come up in practice.

If your compliance office needs a formal arrangement to run a pilot, reach out to harrison@studywithlily.com and we can discuss what a school-official arrangement would look like for your program.

How invite codes work

• Each cohort has its own invite code. You share the code with your students however you normally share class resources.
• Codes rotate on demand. If a code leaks outside your class, you can rotate it from the cohort settings and share the new code. The old code stops working immediately.
• Codes can also be set to expire after a date you choose, which is useful for a single-semester pilot.
• Redeeming a code does not bypass a student's consent. Every student sees a confirmation screen before enrollment is written.

How students leave a cohort

Students can leave a cohort from Settings at any time. When a student leaves:

• Their roster entry is removed. You no longer see their name or email on the cohort list.
• They stop contributing to future cohort aggregates. Past aggregates, which were never tied to their identity, remain correct.
• Their personal account and study history remain intact. Leaving a cohort does not delete anything they created on their own.

How instructors remove a student

Instructors can remove a student from a cohort from the cohort management screen. Removing a student has the same effect as the student leaving voluntarily: their roster entry is removed, they stop contributing to future aggregates, and their personal account is untouched.

If a student who was removed later wants to rejoin, they need a current invite code and will go through the consent screen again.

Related pages

• Privacy Policy: Cohort Participation for the full legal text.
• Pilot privacy at a glance for a student-facing summary of what instructors see.
• StudyWithLily for Nursing Instructors for the product overview.

Questions

If your program is evaluating Study With Lily and has a specific question we have not answered here, email harrison@studywithlily.com. We read everything and we will not route you through a sales funnel.