# Scholar — first-day tutorial Two walkthroughs: one for teachers, one for students. Each takes about ten minutes. Read whichever applies to you; you don't need both. If your school's IT person already deployed Scholar to the cloud, ignore the "local demo" notes — those are only for kicking the tires from a single laptop with no internet. --- ## For teachers ### 1. Make an account 1. Open the URL your IT person sent you (or `index.html` if you're trying it locally). 2. Click **Create account**, pick **Teacher**, fill in your name + a school email + a password. 3. If a *teacher access code* was set, paste it. Otherwise leave it blank. ### 2. Open your first class You'll land on **Home**. There are no classes yet — that's normal. 1. Click **Open a new class**. 2. Give it a name (`PHIL 204 — Information Ethics`), an optional course code (`PHIL 204`), and a term (`Spring 2026`). 3. Hit **Create**. Scholar generates a six-letter join code (e.g. `K7P4NQ`) and shows it on the next screen — copy that and share it with your students. (You can always come back to this code from the topbar.) You're now inside the class. The topbar shows the class title, the course code, the term, and the join code chip you can re-copy any time. ### 3. Set the tone — write your first prompt The default landing tab is **Announcements**. Skip ahead by clicking a room in the sidebar (or **Open a new room** under the channel list). A *room* is where one discussion lives. There are two kinds: - **Discussion room** — one prompt at a time, threaded replies, gradeable. - **Chat room** — flat, conversational, no prompt. Use for office hours, midterm-help, common-room banter. Chats are never AI-checked. For your first room, pick **Discussion**. Give it a name (`media-criticism`), a sentence of context, and an optional character: open, debate, reading circle, or office hours. The character lightly tints the room and shapes the framing helper text. In the room, click **Set the prompt**. Write the question you want students to wrestle with. The framing field accepts plain text; if you want a strong "Take a position:" call-to-action, type it literally — Scholar styles it. ### 4. Hand out an assignment **Assignments** in the sidebar opens the LMS view. 1. Click **New assignment**. 2. Pick a type: paper, problem-set, or quiz. 3. Set a title, instructions, due date, and points possible. 4. Optional: tie it to a specific room so students see it next to the prompt. 5. Save. Students will see it under **Assignments** with a countdown. When students submit, you'll see drafts in the gradebook view. Click a student to grade. ### 5. Calibrate the AI checker Open the **Calibration** sidebar item. 1. Paste two or more sample paragraphs that an LLM produced for an assignment in your subject. (You can also import a `.docx`, `.pdf`, `.rtf`, or `.html` file with the **Upload sample** button.) 2. Scholar extracts repeated 3-word phrases that appeared in 2+ samples. Those become *learned phrases* the detector watches for. 3. Calibration is per-class. Different classes can have different AI-prose fingerprints. The detector itself runs twelve independent checks: | Signal | What it watches for | |---|---| | `stock_phrases` | "delve into", "tapestry of", "in today's rapidly evolving"… (multi-word matches only) | | `first_person` | Absence of "I", "me", "my" in writing long enough to use them | | `low_burstiness` | Sentences all roughly the same length | | `no_contractions` | "do not", "it is" never shortened | | `hedge_heavy` | "indeed", "notably", "furthermore" appearing too often | | `low_diversity` | Small unique-word ratio | | `em_dash_heavy` | Three or more em-dashes per few sentences | | `list_scaffolding` | Numbered/bullet lists in short forum replies | | `uniform_openers` | Same first word repeated, or transition-word openers stacked | | `flat_punctuation` | No colons, semicolons, em-dashes, or questions in a long passage | | `no_citations` | Long passage with no author/year/page reference | | `calibration_match` | Phrases from your uploaded samples turning up | When a post trips enough signals to register `high`, you'll see a small *pencil note* under the post listing each signal that fired and the measurement behind it. The note is never shown to the student — only to you. You can dismiss the flag, ask the student to expand, or click **Show all signals** to see every check (fired and not-fired) with its underlying number. > Scholar never reports a percentage. The framing is "X of 12 signals > fired" because that's what the math actually is — a sum of independent > heuristic checks, not a probability. ### 6. Send an announcement **Announcements** in the sidebar. Type a message, hit **Post**. It pins to the top of every student's feed until they acknowledge it. Useful for "no class Friday", "rubric clarification", "office hours moved". ### 7. Help and recovery - **Help** in the sidebar opens an in-app version of this tutorial. - **Forgot password** on the sign-in screen: type your email, you'll get a reset link in your inbox (cloud mode) or a six-letter demo code (local mode). That's enough to run a class. Everything else — readings library, the moderation log, gradebook export — is in the sidebar where you'd expect. --- ## For students ### 1. Sign up 1. Open the link your teacher gave you. 2. Click **Create account**, pick **Student**, fill in your name + your school email + a password. 3. Pick your section (1, 2, or 3) if asked — your teacher will tell you which. ### 2. Join the class You'll land on **Home**. The first time, you have no classes. 1. Click **Join a class**. 2. Paste the six-letter code your teacher shared (e.g. `K7P4NQ`). 3. Click **Join**. You're in. If you're enrolled in more than one class, you'll see them all on Home; click any class card to enter. Use the crest in the topbar to come back to Home and switch. ### 3. Read the prompt and post The default tab is **Announcements** — read whatever's pinned, then click a room in the sidebar. In a discussion room you'll see the teacher's prompt at the top: - **What to do.** Usually one substantive post (a paragraph or two of argument with at least one citation), plus a couple of replies that engage someone else's reasoning. - **Word minimum + reply count** are listed under the prompt. Click **Write a reply** to compose. The editor supports italics, bold, and `> blockquote`. Cite sources inline like `(Author 2024, p. 42)`. When you're ready, **Post**. > If your teacher set up the room as "first post required", you have to > write your own reply before you can read other people's. This is the > good kind of friction — it stops you from anchoring on what someone > else already said. ### 4. Reply, react, cite Each post has four reaction buttons: **agree**, **push back**, **curious**, **cite this**. They're tallies — a way to signal engagement quickly. Use **push back** to signal disagreement without having to write a full reply (though writing the reply is better). Click **Reply** under any post to thread your response. ### 5. See your assignments **Assignments** in the sidebar shows everything your teacher has handed out, with countdowns. Click into one to read instructions and submit. You can save drafts — they stay on your device until you click **Submit**. After submitting, you can see your grade and any feedback once your teacher posts it. Other students never see your grade. ### 6. Anonymous posts If a topic is sensitive, the composer has a small **post anonymously** toggle. Classmates see "Anonymous" instead of your name. Your teacher still sees who wrote it (we have to — accreditation rules), but it's flagged so they know you chose to be anonymous. ### 7. Forgot password On the sign-in screen, click **Forgot your password?** Enter your email. You'll get a reset link in your inbox (cloud mode) or a six-letter code shown right on screen (local-demo mode). ### 8. Help **Help** in the sidebar has an in-app version of this guide if you'd like to skim it again. --- ## What Scholar does *not* do - **No grade-tampering.** Students see only their own grades; teachers see only grades for their own class. Rules enforced in the database, not just in the browser. - **No AI scoring of student writing without context.** The checker is a teacher tool — students never see a "X% AI" number on their post. When the checker fires, the teacher sees a list of factual observations and decides what to do. - **No cross-class data leakage.** Each class has its own rooms, prompts, gradebook, calibration, and roster. Joining a second class doesn't reveal the first one to anyone. - **No telemetry.** Scholar doesn't phone home. The only network traffic is to your own Supabase project (if your school deployed one) or none at all (local demo). --- ## When things break | Symptom | Probably | |---|---| | "Email not confirmed" | Check your inbox, or your teacher turned off confirmations — try again. | | Reset link expired | Click "Forgot your password?" again — links last one hour. | | Posts not appearing in real time | The teacher's Supabase realtime publication isn't on. Show them the SETUP.md note. | | "new row violates row-level security" | You tried something only a teacher can do. If you're a teacher and still seeing this, you signed up as student — ask the teacher to demote-and-promote your account. | | The page looks frozen | Refresh once. Your work is saved. | For anything else, the **Help** tab has links and contact info.