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Content & safety
Students write some of the problems here. So we check all of them.
The Problem Setter Club is the most valuable thing on the platform and the thing that most obviously needs guardrails. Here is exactly what happens between a student writing a problem and another student seeing it.
Quality gates
Four gates, in order. A problem that fails one goes back.
Automated validation
Format check, LaTeX render test, and a plagiarism scan against the existing problem bank and known competition archives. Runs the moment a draft is submitted.
Peer review
Two Junior Setters, or one Senior Setter, check correctness and clarity independently. Reviewers score against a published rubric: rigour 25%, originality 25%, clarity 20%, elegance 15%, difficulty accuracy 15%.
Beta solve
Between 10 and 30 students attempt the problem before publication. Solve rate and time-to-solve are recorded, and the claimed difficulty band is corrected against that data rather than the author's opinion.
Editorial approval
A staff editor signs off, finalises the difficulty tag and the topic tags, and takes responsibility for the problem going live. Narrative mission text additionally passes a tone review.
Problems keep being watched after publication: anything holding a solve rate above 90% at its stated tier is automatically re-tagged easier.
Content standards
What a problem may never contain
These apply to problem statements, solutions, mission narrative and forum posts alike.
- Personal attacks, harassment, or anything directed at an identifiable student.
- Political content, or scenarios that take a side on a contested political question.
- Discriminatory language, or stereotyping by race, religion, gender, disability or nationality.
- Culturally insensitive scenarios — including framing real conflicts, disasters or communities as puzzle material.
- Content requiring outside purchases, accounts or downloads to solve.
Any user can flag content. Flagged items reach a moderator within 24 hours.
Younger students
Under-16s and data
- A guardian confirms consent before an under-16 account becomes active.
- We hold a name, a year group and platform activity. No home address, no phone number.
- Public profiles show a display name and House — never a school name or location unless the school opts in.
- Direct messaging between students is not a feature. Community interaction happens in moderated forums and in mentoring sessions that are logged.
- Mentors are matched, never self-selected, and every session is recorded against both accounts.
- Data export and deletion endpoints are available to the account holder and, for school seats, the school admin. Deletion removes the record.
Moderation
What happens when a rule is broken.
Enforcement is published so students know it before they test it, and so parents and teachers can see it without asking.
| Category | Policy | Enforcement |
|---|---|---|
| Plagiarism | Zero tolerance. Permanent ban from submitting problems; existing accepted problems are withdrawn and credit removed. | Automated + manual |
| Contest cheating | Score voided for the round and the student is demoted one division. A second instance ends league eligibility for the season. | Anti-cheat alert |
| Hate speech | Immediate content removal and a formal warning. Serious cases skip the warning ladder entirely. | Flag → moderator |
| Harassment | Content removed, contact between the accounts blocked, guardians and school notified where a school seat is involved. | Flag → moderator |
| Repeated flags | Three upheld warnings trigger a seven-day suspension from posting and submitting. | Automated escalation |
| Spam | Content removed and the account rate-limited on posting. | Rate-limit + flag |
| False reporting | A warning to the reporter. Repeated bad-faith reports remove flagging rights. | Manual review |
Verification
Why the Passport can't be gamed.
- Entries are written by the platform, never typed in by the student.
- Every entry is cryptographically timestamped against an append-only audit log. No process — including ours — can edit or delete a log row.
- Students can add to a Passport. They cannot subtract from one. A poor season stays on the record.
- Results from outside SciPookie require a supporting document, reviewed by staff within five working days, and are labelled as externally sourced.
- A passport integrity score flags records whose activity is internally inconsistent.