Terms of use
Using The AI Program means agreeing to these. They are short because there is not much to say: this is a free course, we are not selling you anything, and the main things worth writing down are what the certificate is not and what the AI can get wrong.
You must be 18 or over
Accounts are for adults. You confirm your age when you ask for a place, and we take you at your word. If you are under 18, ask a teacher to run this material with you in a school setting instead.
The certificate is not academic credit
Finishing the work earns a certificate of completion. It is not course credit, it is not a transcript entry, and it carries no standing at Iowa State University or anywhere else. It does not transfer, it does not count toward a degree, and no admissions office is obliged to recognize it. It is a record that you did the work, which is worth something, but it is worth exactly that.
The AI can be wrong, and you have to check it
The AI tutor and the automatic project grader are language models. They produce confident text that is sometimes incorrect. Nothing either of them says is authoritative, including explanations of your code, claims about how Python behaves, and any grade or feedback a model wrote. Run the code. Read the error. If the tutor and the interpreter disagree, the interpreter is right.
If you think an automatically produced grade is wrong, ask your instructor to look at it. A human can override any of it.
Use the tutor and the board in good faith
The tutor is there to help you learn. Do not use it to generate work you then pass off as your own, and do not try to talk it into handing over solutions. There is no automatic detector watching for that; what there is instead is that every message you send is kept and your course staff can read the whole conversation, so working around the tutor is visible to the person grading you.
On the discussion board: no harassment, no abuse, no spam, no posting other people's personal information, and no dumping complete solutions where other students are still working on the exercise. Do not attempt to break, overload, or find your way around the platform's access controls.
Your code is yours
You keep ownership of everything you write. We store it so the platform can grade it, show it back to you, and let your instructor help you with it, and we make no claim on it beyond that. Course content is a separate matter: the lessons are adapted from open educational resources and carry their own licenses, listed on the content sources page.
Enrollment is at our discretion
Requests to join are approved by a person, one at a time, and there is no obligation to approve any particular one. An account can be suspended or removed for abuse, for harassment of other students, for attempting to break the platform, or for academic dishonesty. We will tell you if that happens.
It is provided as is
The platform is offered free and with no warranty of any kind. It may be unavailable, it may lose data, it may change, and it may stop being offered. There is no uptime commitment and no guaranteed response time to a question. To the fullest extent the law allows, nobody involved in providing it is liable for any loss arising from using it. If your work matters to you, keep your own copy of it.
Iowa law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Iowa, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The course is offered from the United States.
These terms can change
If they do, the date at the top of this page moves. Continuing to use the platform after that is how you accept the new version.
Questions: adisak@iastate.edu. See also the privacy notice and the getting started page.