Editorial Standards

This page exists because the subject is full of writing produced by people selling something, and a site telling you to check who is making a claim has to say who is making its own.

Funding and conflicts

We take no money from any company selling AI tools, detection products, or educational technology. No sponsorship, no affiliate links, no paid placements, no free products in exchange for coverage, no advertising from this market.

For a workplace-oriented comparison outside education, this resource offers another way to look at measurement, workload, behaviour, or accountability.

If that ever changes, it will be stated at the top of this page and on every affected article, before the article. A disclosure that arrives after the recommendation is not a disclosure.

How we treat claims

Demonstrated, promised, or asserted. Every claim about what these tools achieve falls into one of three categories, and we say which. A randomised trial, a survey, and a vendor's statement are three different kinds of thing.

For an external perspective on editorial standards and publishing practice, see Poynter.

Every figure carries a source and a date. Not "research shows" but who found it, when, and in what publication.

Interested sources are labelled. In several areas — detection accuracy, teaching resources, student data compliance — most of the accessible written material is produced by companies with something to sell. Where that is the situation, we say so rather than quietly borrowing the numbers.

Status claims carry a check date. Anything about what a tool currently does or what a rule currently requires is dated, because both change monthly and a reader six months from now needs to know how stale it is.

Uncertainty is stated, not rounded up. Where the evidence is thin we say it is thin. Where the answer is unknown we say it is unknown.

What we do not publish

Rankings of tools. Purchase recommendations. Legal advice. Case studies naming schools, teachers or students. Predictions about what these tools will do next.

Authorship

Every article carries a named author with a stated background, so you can weigh what you read against who wrote it. For a site whose readers make decisions affecting children, an unsigned page is not good enough.

Corrections

Errors are logged on the corrections page, with the date and what changed. We do not edit mistakes away silently. A site arguing that vendors should publish unflattering results has to apply the same rule to itself.