Terms of Use

1. Acceptance of these terms

These Terms of Use (the "Terms") set out the basis on which A1 STEM Academy ("A1 STEM Academy," "we," "us," or "our") provides our services. They apply to our website at https://a1stemacademy.com, to our members' portal at a1stem.academy, and to the tutoring and test-preparation we deliver (together, the "Services"). "Site" below means either of those websites.

By using the Site, creating an account, enrolling a student, contacting us about tutoring, or attending a session, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated here by reference. If you do not agree, please do not use the Site or the Services.

These are the only terms that apply. However you enrol and whichever of our services you use, these Terms and our Privacy Policy are what govern the relationship.

2. Who may use the Site and services

To book tutoring, agree to these Terms, or make a payment you must be at least 18 and legally able to enter into a contract. A minor may not enrol themselves.

A parent or legal guardian who enrols a student agrees to these Terms on their own behalf and on behalf of that student, is responsible for the student's compliance with them, and is responsible for all fees. They also confirm they have authority to consent to the student receiving tutoring and to the handling of the student's personal data described in our Privacy Policy. You may use the Site and Services only where doing so is lawful where you live.

3. Your account

A parent or legal guardian must create and control the account used for a student — a student may not register themselves, or register while representing themselves as their own guardian. The parent or guardian is responsible for the accuracy of the information provided and for supervising the student's use of the portal.

You are responsible for keeping your login credentials confidential and for activity carried out under your account. Tell us immediately at contact@a1stemacademy.com if you believe someone has used your account without permission. You may ask us to close your account at any time.

4. What we provide

We provide live, one-to-one tutoring and test preparation for students in grades 1–12 (Classes 1–12) — mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and English, plus SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, ACT, and AP preparation. All sessions are delivered live and online; we do not offer in-person tutoring. We teach the curriculum a student already follows, including US state standards, CBSE, ICSE, IB, Cambridge IGCSE, and Indian state boards.

https://a1stemacademy.com is a marketing and information website: no accounts, no login, no contact form — prospective families reach us by email or telephone. Our members' portal at a1stem.academy is where enrolment and day-to-day tutoring are managed: parents enrol students, sessions are scheduled and tracked, families and tutors exchange messages and files, and invoices are issued. Descriptions of programs, schedules, and tutors are indicative and may change.

We are an independent tutoring provider — not a school, not an examination body, and not a certifying authority. We do not award grades, credits, or qualifications.

5. Booking, scheduling, and fees

• Demo class. The first demo class is free, carries no obligation, and is offered once per student at our discretion.
• Enrolment. Tutoring begins when we and the parent or guardian agree on the subject, schedule, and fee. That agreement and these Terms form the contract between us. There is no long term contract; you may stop at any time, subject to section 6.
• Tutor assignment. We assign the tutor we think best fits the student, and will try to reassign if a match is not working. We may change a tutor where necessary and will tell you first.
• Rates and taxes. Current rates are on our pricing page and India pricing page; the rate that applies is the one we confirm in writing when you enrol. Published rates may change for new enrolments at any time, and we will give existing families reasonable advance notice before a change affects them. Fees are exclusive of any applicable tax, which is shown on your invoice.
• Payment. Sessions are payable in advance unless we agree otherwise in writing, in the currency you are billed in. You are responsible for bank charges, card fees, and currency-conversion costs. Payments are handled by third-party providers under their own terms; we do not receive or store full card details. If payment for booked sessions is not received we may pause scheduling.
• Technology. For online sessions you are responsible for a working device, connection, and any software needed. A session that starts late because of the student still ends at its scheduled time.

6. Cancellation, rescheduling, and refunds

There is no lock-in. You may stop at any time, for any reason, without explaining why.

a. Rescheduling and missed sessions

Tell us as far in advance as you reasonably can and we will do our best to move the session at no charge, or leave the class on your balance. Where we cannot reschedule because the tutor's time was already reserved for that slot, the session may be treated as delivered. Children get sick and families have emergencies; we will generally reschedule without charge in those circumstances, and you can pause for holidays, exam weeks, or travel by telling us the dates. If a student simply does not join and we have had no notice, the tutor will remain available for a reasonable part of the session, after which it may be treated as delivered. To reschedule or cancel, contact us at contact@a1stemacademy.com or +1 201-874-4618 , so the change is recorded.

b. If we cancel or a session is disrupted

If we cancel a session, cannot staff it, or a problem with our own equipment, connection, or platform cuts it short, we will reschedule it or credit it back to your balance. Time lost to a problem with your own device or connection is not credited.

c. Stopping tutoring and unused classes

When you stop, the classes left on your balance are refunded. Email contact@a1stemacademy.com to tell us, and we will confirm your remaining balance in writing and issue the refund promptly — to the original payment method wherever possible, in the currency you paid in, with no cancellation fee or administrative charge. Only sessions delivered, or treated as delivered under paragraph (a), are deducted. We do not compensate for exchange-rate movement, and charges applied by your bank or payment provider are outside our control. You may leave the balance in place for later instead of taking a refund.

d. What is not refundable

• Sessions delivered, or treated as delivered under paragraph (a).
• Time lost within a session to a problem with your own device, software, or connection.
• Third-party costs paid to someone else, such as an exam registration fee paid to the College Board, ACT, or an Indian board.
• A session in progress that we end under section 21. Your remaining unused balance is still refunded.

e. If you are unhappy with a session

Tell us promptly at contact@a1stemacademy.com or +1 201-874-4618. We will look into it and, depending on what happened, may assign a different tutor, or try to improve or cancel the remaining classes. We would rather fix it than argue about it.

7. Student and parent responsibilities

To keep sessions safe and useful, you and the student agree to:

• attend ready to work, with the relevant books, homework, and materials to hand;
• treat tutors and staff with respect — we do not tolerate abusive, threatening, harassing, or discriminatory behaviour towards our tutors, in either direction;
• for online sessions with a younger child, ensure a responsible adult is in the home and reachable, and that the student attends from a shared, appropriate space;
• not ask a tutor to complete graded work, sit an examination, or do anything else that would breach a school's or exam board's academic integrity rules. We teach students to do the work; we do not do the work for them, and we may end an engagement over a request of this kind;
• not engage, employ, or retain a tutor we introduced to you — directly, through another person, or through any other tutoring service, and whether or not that tutor is still working with us — for tutoring outside A1 STEM Academy, during the engagement and for 24 months after the last session we arrange for the student. If a court decides that period is longer than it will enforce, this restriction applies instead for the longest period, and over the narrowest scope, that the court will enforce;
• not record, copy, republish, or share session content or our materials except as sections 9 and 13 allow; and
• tell us promptly about any concern regarding a tutor, a session, or a student's safety.

The restriction on engaging our tutors privately exists because we recruit, screen, train, and match every tutor ourselves, it is not intended to stop anyone from working.

8. Tutors, supervision, and safeguarding

Our tutors work with minors and are screened before engagement, are expected to keep communication with students on the channels we provide and where a parent can see it, and must report any safeguarding concern to us immediately.

Tutors are engaged by A1 STEM Academy as employees or independent contractors, and nothing in these Terms creates an employment, agency, partnership, or joint-venture relationship between you and a tutor. Tutoring is academic support only: we do not provide childcare, supervision, counselling, psychological assessment, medical advice, or special-education evaluation. You remain responsible for the supervision and welfare of your child during and around sessions.

9. Recording sessions

Neither side may record, photograph, screenshot, or otherwise capture a session without the other's prior written consent. Where recording is agreed — so a student can revisit a difficult topic, for example — the recording may be used only by that student for their own study, and may not be shared, uploaded, or published. We may end an engagement immediately if a session is recorded or circulated without consent.

10. No guarantee of results

Tutoring is a professional service, not a product with a guaranteed outcome. A student's grades, scores, admissions results, and progress depend on many things outside our control: their own effort and attendance, prior preparation, school workload, exam conditions, and the scoring policies of examination bodies.

We do not promise, guarantee, or warrant any particular grade, score, score improvement, percentile, rank, admission, scholarship, or other academic outcome, and nothing on the Site or said by any tutor or member of staff should be read as such a promise. Any figures we publish about past student outcomes describe what those students achieved and are not a prediction of what any other student will achieve.

11. Testimonials

Testimonials, messages, and screenshots shown on the Site are genuine, messages sent to us by students and families, reproduced as received except that names, profile pictures, phone numbers, and other identifying details are removed before publication. We do not pay for them, offer anything of value in exchange for one, or edit them to change their meaning, and no material connection exists between us and the people who sent them.

Each message describes one person's individual experience. Any grade, score, or result mentioned is that student's own outcome and is not typical, average, or guaranteed — see section 10. If you sent us a message that appears on this Site and would prefer it not be shown, email contact@a1stemacademy.com and we will remove it.

12. Exam trademarks and no affiliation

SAT®, PSAT/NMSQT®, and Advanced Placement® / AP® are registered trademarks of the College Board. ACT® is a registered trademark of ACT, Inc. CBSE, ICSE/CISCE, the International Baccalaureate® (IB), and Cambridge IGCSE are the marks of their respective boards and organisations. None of these organisations sponsors, endorses, licenses, reviews, or is otherwise affiliated with A1 STEM Academy or its programs. We reference these names only to describe the examinations and curricula we help students prepare for, which is a nominative fair use. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

13. Intellectual property and your content

The Site and everything on it — text, graphics, logos, images, worksheets, practice questions, lesson plans, and other teaching materials — is owned by or licensed to A1 STEM Academy and protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws. "A1 STEM Academy," our logo, and our branding are our trademarks and may not be used without our written permission.

We grant an enrolled student and their parent or guardian a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the materials we give them for that student's own study, and you may view and share Site content for personal, non-commercial purposes. You may not otherwise copy, distribute, sell, publish, upload to any file-sharing or AI training service, or create derivative works from our content without our written permission. The licence ends when the engagement ends. If you believe material on the Site infringes your copyright, email contact@a1stemacademy.com with details and we will investigate and remove anything infringing.

You keep ownership of anything you send us — a student's homework, essays, questions, or feedback, whether emailed to us or uploaded through the portal. By sending it you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use it for the purpose you sent it for: teaching that student and running our service. Messages that parents or students send us about their experience may be used in our marketing as described in section 11, in de-identified form only; a student's schoolwork is never used that way. General feedback or suggestions about our service we may use freely and without obligation to you. Do not send us anything you do not have the right to send, anything unlawful, or anything that infringes someone else's copyright.

14. Acceptable use of the Site

You agree not to:

• use the Site or Services for any unlawful purpose or in breach of applicable law;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Site, our systems, our accounts, or related networks, or introduce malware or interfere with the Site's operation;
• send us false, misleading, impersonating, or abusive information, or register an account in someone else's name;
• use the portal's messaging or file sharing for anything other than coordinating and supporting tutoring, or upload anything abusive, unlawful, or infringing;
• scrape, crawl, harvest, mirror, or systematically copy Site content, or use it to train a machine-learning model, without our written permission;
• publish or transmit, in connection with our Services, content that is defamatory, obscene, harassing, hateful, invasive of another's privacy, harmful to a child, or infringing; or
• use the Site or Services to compete with us or to build a similar service.

15. Accessibility

We want every family to be able to use this Site, and we work towards the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. If you have difficulty with any part of the Site or need information in another format, email contact@a1stemacademy.com or call +1 201-874-4618 and we will get you what you need in a way that works for you, and fix the problem where we can.

16. Disclaimers

The Site and its content are provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty that the Site will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free. Descriptions of programs, outcomes, pricing, availability, and locations are informational and subject to change.

Content on the Site and in our blog is general educational information, not personalised academic, admissions, financial, medical, or legal advice, and is not a substitute for professional advice about a particular student. Online sessions, scheduling, analytics, and payments rely on third-party services, and the Site links to third-party websites; those are controlled by others under their own terms, we are not responsible for their content or practices, and a link is not an endorsement.

We provide the Services with reasonable care and skill by suitably qualified tutors. Nothing in this section excludes any warranty or condition that applicable law does not permit us to exclude.

17. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, A1 STEM Academy and its owners, staff, and tutors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, data, goodwill, academic opportunity, admission, or scholarship, arising out of or relating to the Site, the Services, or these Terms — whether in contract, tort, statute, or otherwise, and even if we were advised such damages were possible.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Site, the Services, or these Terms will not exceed the total fees you have paid us for the Services to which the claim relates.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else applicable law does not allow to be limited. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you; in that case our liability is limited to the smallest amount the law permits.

18. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless A1 STEM Academy, its owners, staff, and tutors from any claim, loss, liability, or reasonable expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Site or Services, your violation of any law, or your infringement of a third party's rights. We will notify you of any such claim and you may participate in its defence; you may not settle a claim in a way that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

19. Resolving disputes

a. Talk to us first

Almost every problem is solved with a conversation. Wherever you live, before starting any formal proceeding, email contact@a1stemacademy.com describing the problem and what you would like us to do, and we will respond and try to resolve it informally. Both sides must complete this step before starting any arbitration under paragraph (c).

b. Your local rights always come first

If you are a consumer, nothing in these Terms removes any right you have under the law of the country where you live. In particular, nothing in this section prevents you from bringing proceedings in the courts of your own country, from relying on any mandatory consumer protection law that applies to you, or from complaining to a consumer authority, ombudsman, or regulator where you live. Where the law of your country makes any part of this section unenforceable, that part does not apply to you and the rest continues to apply.

Whatever route you take, please contact us first (section 24) so we have the chance to put things right. Where the law where you live requires a complaint to go through a particular officer, body, or procedure before other steps, we will follow it.

c. Arbitration and class action waiver — United States only

This paragraph applies only if you are resident in the United States, and only to the extent the law allows. If we cannot resolve a dispute informally within a reasonable period after the notice in paragraph (a), you and A1 STEM Academy agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to the Site, the Services, or these Terms will be resolved by final and binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator, rather than in court. Arbitration will take place in Middlesex County, New Jersey, by telephone or video, or in the county where you live, at your choice. The arbitrator may award the same individual relief a court could, and judgment may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.

Disputes covered by this paragraph will be arbitrated only on an individual basis. You and A1 STEM Academy waive the right to bring or participate in a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. If that waiver is unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim alone proceeds in court and the rest remains in arbitration.

Either of us may still bring a qualifying claim in small-claims court, or seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or stop unauthorised access to our systems, and nothing here prevents you from reporting a concern to a government agency. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing contact@a1stemacademy.com with the subject line "Arbitration Opt-Out," giving your name and the student's name, promptly after you first agree to these Terms and before any dispute arises. Opting out affects nothing else in these Terms and will not affect the Services you receive.

d. Time limit for bringing a claim

To the fullest extent permitted by the law that applies to you, any claim arising out of or relating to the Site, the Services, or these Terms must be brought within one year after the claim arises, whether in arbitration or in court, and whether or not you have opted out under paragraph (c). A claim not brought within that period is permanently barred. This paragraph does not apply wherever the law that applies to you does not permit a limitation period to be shortened.

20. Governing law

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the courts located in Middlesex County, New Jersey have jurisdiction, subject to section 19. For users in the United States, the Federal Arbitration Act governs paragraph (c) of that section.

If you are a consumer, this choice of law and jurisdiction does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory law of the country where you live, or of your right to bring proceedings in your local courts. Section 19 explains how that works.

21. Termination and events outside our control

You may stop using the Site, or ask us to close your portal account, at any time. Either of us may end a tutoring engagement on reasonable notice, with unused prepaid classes refunded under section 6.

We may suspend or end access immediately, without refund of the session in progress, if you or the student seriously breach section 7 or section 14 — for example, abusive behaviour towards a tutor, a request to breach academic integrity rules, or unauthorised recording or distribution of our materials. Sections 10 to 13 and 16 to 20 survive termination.

We are not liable for any delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control — power or internet failure, failure of a third-party platform, natural disaster, epidemic, strike, war, civil unrest, or government action. Where a session is missed for such a reason, we will reschedule or credit it.

22. General terms

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the written enrolment terms we agree with you are the entire agreement between us and replace any earlier understanding on the same subject.
• Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Notices. You consent to receive communications from us electronically, and agree these satisfy any legal requirement that a communication be in writing. Notices to us go to contact@a1stemacademy.com; notices to you go to the email address on your file.
• No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms give rights only to you and us, except that our owners, staff, and tutors may rely on sections 17 and 18.

23. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time; the date at the top of this page shows the current version. For material changes we will give reasonable advance notice by email to current families, or by a prominent notice on the Site, before the change takes effect. Continued use after that date means you accept the updated Terms; if you do not accept them, stop using the Site and tell us you wish to end the engagement, and we will refund unused prepaid classes.

24. Contact and grievance redressal

See also our Privacy Policy.