Terms of service

The agreement

DesignSense is a learning platform and a Marshmallow.Projects partner product. It teaches UI/UX design and coding through project-based courses, and issues certificates and the DesignSense License — credentials anyone can check against our public registry.

By creating an account you accept these terms and the privacy policy, which explains what we do with your data. If you are using DesignSense on behalf of an employer or school, you confirm you are allowed to accept these terms for them.

Where these terms mention a feature that is not yet available on the platform, the term applies from the moment that feature is.

Accounts and eligibility

• You must be 13 or older to hold an account. Individual courses may set a higher minimum age — an 18+ course will say so on its page, and we may ask for identity documents before you can enrol in one.
• One account per person. Credentials are issued to a named individual, so an account shared between people cannot produce a credential that means anything.
• Your details must be accurate. Your name is printed on any certificate or License you earn and shown on its public verification page. We verify your email address before your account can enrol — that is where your credential is delivered. Your phone number is required but not verified: we use it to reach you about a booked exam or a printed certificate.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access, and we will end every active session on it.

Enrolment and access

Enrolment starts when your payment is confirmed. Some courses have hard prerequisites — you need the earlier credential before the later course opens — and those are listed on each course page before you pay.

Access is personal to you and lasts for the enrolment period shown at checkout. Courses sold as a subscription bill on the period stated there and continue until you cancel.

Prices and payment

The price shown at checkout is the price you pay, in the currency shown. You are responsible for any tax or bank charge your own jurisdiction adds.

Cryptocurrency payments

We accept BTC, LTC and USDT. Three things about that flow matter enough to state plainly:

• Confirmation is manual. After you send a payment, your order sits in a pending state until a member of staff matches it on-chain. This is not instant, and an order is not access until it is confirmed.
• USDT is accepted on BEP-20 only. Checkout labels the network on every address. A transfer sent on a different network cannot be recovered by us or by anyone else, and we cannot credit it.
• Send the exact amount to the address shown for your order. A payment we cannot match to an order is a payment we cannot credit.

Card and PayPal

Where PayPal is offered, the payment is processed by PayPal under their terms. We never receive or store your card number.

Refunds

You can request a refund within 14 days of paying, provided you have not completed more than 20% of the course and have not started its final exam or submitted its final project. Write to us from the address on your account and say which order you mean.

After that window, we refund where:

• we cancel a course or cohort you paid for and cannot offer you a replacement;
• a payment was taken in error or twice for the same order;
• the law where you live gives you a right to one.

Refunds go back by the route the payment arrived. A crypto payment is refunded in the same asset on the same network, to an address you supply, less the network fee — the amount you receive can differ from the amount you sent because the exchange rate moved, and we refund the asset, not a currency value.

A refund takes back what the payment bought. Your enrolment on that course ends, and a refunded examination fee releases the seat you booked — seats are capped at fifteen a session, so a refunded booking that kept its seat would deny it to someone who would have sat the exam. Any referral credits the payment earned are withdrawn with it.

Issued credentials are not refundable once earned. If a refund is issued for a course whose credential you already hold, that credential is revoked with it.

Credits, referrals and discount codes

Refer someone and you both get 10% off, and you earn 10 credits once they complete a paid enrolment — not when they sign up. A credit is worth $1.00 against what you owe us.

• Credits are not money. They have no cash value, cannot be withdrawn, sold, or transferred to another account, and we do not refund them as cash. They offset what you owe us and nothing else.
• There is a lifetime cap of 100 referral credits per account. The scheme is meant to thank you for telling a friend, not to become an income.
• Referring yourself does not count. Accounts created to refer each other, or a second account of your own, forfeit the credits and can be closed under acceptable use.
• Exam fees take credits, not coupons. Discount codes apply to course prices; credits are the only thing that offsets an examination fee. At most 2 codes can be used on one order.
• A reversed payment reverses what it earned. If the enrolment behind a referral is refunded or charged back, the credits it produced are withdrawn.

We can change or end the scheme, and we will say so before we do. Credits you have already earned stay spendable.

Your work

Your coursework stays yours. Nothing you upload — code, designs, written answers, portfolio links — transfers to us.

You give us permission to store your submissions, show them to the instructors grading them, and keep them as the record behind a grade or a credential. That permission goes no further: your work is served only to you, the course’s lead instructor, and admin staff, and a submission’s URL is checked against that list on every request. It is not public because you submitted it.

We show student work publicly — in a showcase, on social media, in marketing — only if you opt in to that specific use. You can withdraw the permission for future use at any time.

You are responsible for having the right to submit what you submit. Do not upload work that belongs to someone else, or material you are not allowed to share.

Our content and brand

Course materials — lessons, labs, exam questions, rubrics, templates — belong to us or our licensors. While your enrolment is active you may use them for your own study, including on personal and commercial projects you build from them. You may not republish, redistribute, resell, or feed them into a service that reproduces them for other people.

Exam questions and hidden test suites are confidential. Sharing them, in any form, is treated under academic integrity rather than as an ordinary breach of these terms.

The DesignSense and Marshmallow.Projects names, logos and wordmarks are ours. Holding a credential lets you state that you hold it, and use the badge we provide for that purpose, in the form we provide it. It does not make you a partner, agent, or authorised representative, and it does not license the logo for anything else.

Exams and proctoring

Exams are sat in booked slots, and a slot holds at most fifteen students because that is how many one person can invigilate. Booking reserves your seat before you pay, so nobody takes your place while the payment clears — but an unpaid reservation is released after 24 hours and the seat returns to the pool. Book again whenever you like; nothing is held against you.

A cryptocurrency payment awaiting confirmation is not released. Once you have told us you sent it, the seat is yours while a member of staff matches the transaction — waiting on us is never a reason to lose it.

Course finals and the License exam are proctored. Sitting one means agreeing to be monitored for its duration, which involves:

• webcam snapshots taken at intervals during the attempt;
• detection of the exam window losing focus, and blocking of copy and paste;
• a server-side timer that ends the attempt at its deadline regardless of your device clock.

Signals that look unusual raise a flag, and a flagged attempt is reviewed by a person before its result is trusted. A flag is not an accusation and never becomes a verdict on its own — a dropped connection and a second face in the frame both raise one, and only one of those is cheating. A dropped connection is specifically not counted as suspicious.

What proctoring records, and how long we keep it, is set out in the privacy policy.

Academic integrity

The whole claim of a DesignSense credential is that it can be checked and that it means something. That only holds if the work behind it is the holder’s own. The following are breaches:

• having someone else sit an exam, complete a lab, or hold your account;
• using unauthorised material or a second device during a proctored exam;
• sharing or obtaining exam questions, hidden tests, or answers;
• submitting someone else’s work as your own, including uncredited AI output where a lab requires your own work;
• tampering with the proctoring client, the autograder, or the submission flow.

Where a breach is established after review, we may void the attempt, fail the lab or course, revoke an issued certificate or License, and suspend or close the account. Severe or repeated breaches end enrolment without refund. You can appeal any of these outcomes under grading and appeals.

Grading and appeals

Labs are graded against the rubric published with the lab, before you submit it. Where an autograder runs, it never releases a grade on its own: its result goes to an instructor, who reviews it and can override it in either direction.

Lateness is handled separately from the grade. Your work is scored on its merits, and any late penalty is applied afterwards — you see the raw score and the final score, not one unexplained number.

If you think a grade is wrong, reply to it and say why within 14 days. An instructor who did not grade the original work reviews the appeal where one is available. Appeals are about the rubric and the evidence, and the outcome can be a higher, unchanged, or lower score.

Certificates and the DesignSense License

Pass a course final and we issue a certificate carrying a code beginning DS-. The DesignSense License is a separate professional credential, not a course: it has its own prerequisites and exam, its code begins DSL-, and it is valid for 30 months and renewable.

Every credential has a public verification page showing the holder’s name, what it was awarded for, and when. Because a License can lapse or be withdrawn, its page also shows current status and expiry. Holding a credential means accepting that this page exists — a credential nobody can check is not a credential.

We may suspend or revoke a credential where it was obtained through a breach of academic integrity, where the payment behind it was reversed or refunded, or where it was issued in error. We will tell you why, and you can appeal.

A printed certificate can be requested after issue; we arrange printing and delivery separately and will confirm the details with you first.

A DesignSense credential is a private qualification awarded by us. It is not a government licence, a regulatory registration, or a professional body membership, and it does not entitle you to practise anywhere that requires one.

Community conduct

Linking your Discord account gives you the channels and roles your enrolments entitle you to, and unlinking removes them. In our community spaces: no harassment, no hate speech, no spam, no sharing of course material or exam content, no unsolicited promotion.

We can remove a post, a role, or a member from the community for breaching this, and doing so does not by itself affect your course access — the two are separate, and a serious breach can affect both.

Acceptable use

Do not:

• share, sell, or transfer your account or your access to a course;
• work around access controls, rate limits, or payment;
• scrape the platform, bulk-download materials, or automate access to it;
• upload malware, or use a lab environment to attack anything;
• submit false verification details, use a disposable email address to evade limits, or create accounts in bulk;
• interfere with anyone else’s use of the platform.

Changes to courses

Courses are revised as the subjects move. We may update or replace lessons, labs, and exams while you are enrolled, and we may retire a course from the catalogue. If a course you are enrolled in is retired, your access continues for the rest of your enrolment period, and any credential you have already earned from it stays valid and verifiable.

We aim to keep the platform available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted. Maintenance, provider outages, and faults happen.

Suspension and closure

You can close your account at any time. Closing it ends your access to courses you are enrolled in and does not by itself entitle you to a refund. Credentials you have already earned stay valid and stay verifiable — that is what makes them checkable by an employer years later.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that we are legally required to act against, or that is being used to harm other students. Except where an immediate suspension is needed, we will tell you what the problem is first and give you a chance to fix it.

What we do not promise

We do not promise a job, a client, an interview, a salary, or any other outcome. What we provide is the teaching, the assessment, and a credential an employer can verify. What that credential is worth to any particular employer is their judgement, not ours.

The platform is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties — including that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular purpose. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Liability

Where we are liable to you, our total liability for all claims connected to your use of DesignSense is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost opportunity, or loss of data, except where the law does not allow that exclusion. We are not liable for cryptocurrency sent to the wrong network or the wrong address, or for a payment you cannot evidence.

Changes to these terms

We update these terms when the platform changes or the law requires it. The date at the top always reflects the last substantive change. For a change that materially affects your rights, we will tell you by email or in the platform before it takes effect, and continuing to use DesignSense after that date means you accept the new version. If you do not, you can close your account.

Governing law

Talk to us before going further. Most disputes are a misunderstanding about a grade, an order, or a credential, and those are quicker to fix directly.

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