Legal

Terms of Service

Effective date: 22 July 2026  ·  Last updated: 22 July 2026

1. Acceptance of Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") constitute a legally binding agreement between you and Emzini weCode ("we", "us", or "our"), the operator of Poseidon (the "Platform"). By registering for, accessing, or using Poseidon, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and our Privacy Policy.

If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of an educational institution or organisation, you represent that you have the authority to bind that organisation, and "you" includes that organisation.

2. Description of the Platform

Poseidon is a hosted, multi-tenant grading and assessment platform for educational institutions. Emzini weCode operates a single central deployment; your institution is provisioned as a tenant on it. You do not install, host, or operate the Platform. It provides tools for:

• Autograding of programming assignments in sandboxed environments
• Rubric-based grading and structured feedback for any submission type
• Grading of written and PDF examinations, including question-to-page mapping
• Generation and machine reading of printed bubble-sheet (optical mark recognition) examinations
• Group assignments, including per-member grade adjustment
• Grade analytics, item analysis, and course and term reporting
• Academic-integrity case recording and due-process workflow
• Student submission management, grade publishing, regrade requests, and deadline extensions
• An institutional administration portal covering members, courses, usage, and billing

We reserve the right to add, modify, or discontinue features at any time with reasonable notice.

3. Account Types and Roles

Poseidon supports the following account roles within an institution:

• Institution Administrator: manages the institution's Poseidon account, members, courses, and billing. This role is deliberately limited to aggregate information — it does not grant access to student submissions, individual grades, or academic-integrity records.
• Instructor: creates and manages assignments, configures rubrics and autograders, publishes grades, and adjudicates academic-integrity cases in their courses.
• Teaching Assistant (TA): grades submissions and responds to regrade requests under an instructor's supervision. TAs may be restricted to rubric grading and may raise integrity concerns but not decide them.
• Student: submits assignments and views their own grades and feedback, together with the work of any group they belong to.

Emzini weCode additionally maintains operator accounts used solely to run, support, and bill the service. Operator access to institutional data is limited to what is necessary for those purposes and is logged.

Each account must be associated with a legitimate educational institution. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account. You must keep your login credentials confidential and notify us immediately at hello@emziniwecode.com if you suspect unauthorised access.

4. Free Trial and Licensing

Free trial

Poseidon may be accessed for evaluation purposes under a free trial. Free trial access is intended for testing and non-production use. We may impose limits on the number of users, submissions, or storage during the trial period.

Licensed use

Production use of Poseidon (including use with enrolled students in assessed courses) requires a valid licence agreement. Licence terms, pricing, and conditions are agreed separately between Emzini weCode and the institution. Use of the Platform beyond any trial limits without a valid licence is a material breach of these Terms.

Fees and billing

Poseidon is ordinarily licensed as a banded site licence covering an agreed enrolment range, with a true-up where actual usage materially exceeds the licensed band. Fees, currency, billing schedule, and payment terms are set out in your licence agreement. Invoices are issued directly by Emzini weCode against a proforma or purchase order.

Where the Platform displays usage limits, these operate as warnings, not automatic cut-offs: exceeding a limit will notify you and may give rise to a true-up under your licence, but we will not suspend an institution's access mid-term for exceeding a usage threshold. Suspension for non-payment remains governed by your licence agreement.

Licence restrictions

Your licence to use Poseidon is:

• Non-transferable and specific to the licensed institution
• Limited to the number of users or courses agreed in your licence
• Revocable upon breach of these Terms or expiry of the licence period

5. Assessment Accuracy and Human Oversight

Poseidon is a tool that supports assessment decisions made by your institution's staff. It does not make those decisions. This section states the boundary plainly, because it matters to students.

Autograding

Autograders execute the test suites you supply. The correctness, fairness, and completeness of those tests are your responsibility. You are responsible for reviewing autograder output before publishing results to students.

Machine-read examinations

Where you use printed bubble sheets, the Platform reads marks from scanned images using deterministic image processing. It is designed to flag faint, doubled, damaged, or unreadable marks for human resolution rather than guess at them. Nevertheless, mark reading depends on factors outside our control — print quality, scan quality, and how students complete the sheet. You remain responsible for reviewing flagged sheets and for verifying results before they are published or used in any final grade. Original scans are retained so that a disputed reading can be checked against the paper.

Academic integrity

Poseidon does not detect academic misconduct, does not identify AI-generated work, and does not determine guilt or penalty. Integrity records exist only because your staff create them. All investigation, adjudication, penalty, and appeal remain entirely governed by your institution's own policies and processes, and are your institution's responsibility.

At-risk flags and analytics

At-risk indicators, item analysis, and reporting features are advisory information for academic staff. They are not determinations about any student and must not be used as the sole basis for any academic, disciplinary, funding, or admission decision.

6. Acceptable Use

You agree to use Poseidon only for lawful purposes and in accordance with these Terms. You must not:

• Use the Platform to submit or distribute content that is unlawful, defamatory, or infringes the intellectual property rights of any third party
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the Platform, other accounts, or backend systems
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code of the Platform
• Use the Platform to run code that is intentionally malicious, attempts privilege escalation, or exploits the sandbox environment
• Resell, sublicence, or otherwise make the Platform available to third parties outside your licensed institution without our express written consent
• Misrepresent submissions, grades, or academic work in a way that constitutes academic fraud under your institution's policies

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate access to any account that violates these provisions without prior notice.

7. Intellectual Property

Platform IP

Poseidon, including its source code, design, algorithms, user interface, documentation, and all related intellectual property, is owned exclusively by Emzini weCode and is protected by applicable copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. These Terms do not transfer any ownership rights to you.

Your content

You retain ownership of content you submit to Poseidon, including assignment files, rubric definitions, and grading materials ("Your Content"). By using the Platform, you grant Emzini weCode a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to store, process, and display Your Content solely as necessary to provide and improve the Platform.

Student submissions

Student submissions remain the intellectual property of the submitting student (subject to any assignment of rights under your institution's academic policies). Poseidon processes submissions solely to facilitate grading and assessment.

8. Data and Privacy

Your use of Poseidon is subject to our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. In summary:

• We collect and process personal data as described in the Privacy Policy.
• We may analyse grading data, assessment outcomes, and submission patterns in aggregated or de-identified form to improve the Platform's features.
• We do not use student data to train machine-learning models, our own or any third party's, and no automated system in the Platform makes decisions about individual students.
• We do not sell personal data to third parties.
• Institution administrators are responsible for obtaining any necessary consents from students, particularly those under 13, as required by applicable law.
• Your institution may file data export and deletion requests through its administration portal; these are tracked and actioned as described in the Privacy Policy.

9. Availability and Service Levels

We aim to provide a reliable, high-availability platform. However, we do not warrant uninterrupted or error-free access to Poseidon. Planned maintenance will be communicated in advance where practicable. We are not liable for any loss arising from temporary unavailability of the Platform.

10. Disclaimer of Warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Poseidon is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy of autograding results, accuracy of marks read from scanned examination sheets, or non-infringement. You are responsible for verifying that grading outputs are accurate before publishing results to students, as set out in section 5.

11. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Emzini weCode shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of data, academic outcomes, or business interruption, arising from your use of or inability to use the Platform, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Our total liability for any claim arising under these Terms shall not exceed the licence fees paid by your institution to Emzini weCode in the three months preceding the claim.

12. Termination

Either party may terminate the licence agreement with written notice as specified in the applicable licence. We may suspend or terminate your access immediately if you materially breach these Terms. Upon termination, your right to access Poseidon ceases. Data retention after termination is governed by our Privacy Policy.

Data export on exit. On termination or expiry, and on request within the retention period described in the Privacy Policy, we will provide your institution with an export of its data — courses, rosters, assignments, and grades — in a machine-readable format, at no additional charge. We do not hold institutional data hostage as leverage in a renewal.

13. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Zimbabwe. Any dispute arising from or relating to these Terms shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Zimbabwe, unless otherwise agreed in a separate written licence agreement.

14. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We will notify registered users of material changes by email at least 14 days before they take effect. Continued use of the Platform after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. If you do not agree to any updated Terms, you must cease using the Platform and contact us to terminate your account.

15. Contact

For questions about these Terms or your licence, contact:
Emzini weCode
hello@emziniwecode.com
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe