The terms under which Doctoral Compass is offered.

Doctoral Compass operates the website at doctoralcompass.com and a growing set of products for PhD researchers: a free bilingual diagnostic and its reports, live workshops, expert manuscript review, cohort programs, and one-to-one coaching. Further products (such as self-paced e-courses) are being rolled out over time. The diagnostic and its reports are offered free of charge. Paid products — expert review, cohort programs and one-to-one coaching — show their price and specific terms at the point of purchase.

Paid products are bought as a whole: an expert review order, a place in a cohort program, or a coaching pack of a chosen number of one-to-one sessions. You pay by bank transfer and upload your receipt; your purchase is confirmed once we have verified the transfer. Prices, the number of sessions, and any discount that applies are shown before you commit, and are fixed at that moment — a later promotion does not change a purchase already made, and sessions added to a pack afterwards are charged at the normal price.

All sales are final. We do not offer refunds or cancellations once a payment has been confirmed. This is stated at the point of purchase and you accept it there.

For one-to-one coaching you reserve your session times yourself. Reserved times are held for 24 hours while we wait for your payment; if the transfer does not arrive, those times are released to other students and you simply choose new ones — your pack is unaffected. To move or cancel a booked session, write to tahar@doctoralcompass.com or t.harkat@gmail.com at least 48 hours before it starts and we will reschedule it with your coach. Inside that 48-hour window, and for sessions you do not attend, the session counts as delivered.

We may need to move a session ourselves — illness, a scheduling conflict, or a technical problem. If we do, we will tell you by email and offer a replacement time at no cost to you.

You may take the diagnostic without an account. Unlocking your personalized full report requires creating a free account with your real first and last name, email, PhD level, field of study, and country. You agree to provide accurate information at signup and to keep that information current. You can sign in with Google OAuth or with your email and a password (which we hash and salt with bcrypt before storing). If you forget your password, you can reset it via a one-time email link.

You may not: scrape the test, the reports, or the framework content; resell, redistribute, or repurpose the framework or archetype content as your own; submit knowingly false responses to disrupt the calibration data; or attempt to disrupt, overload, or reverse-engineer the service infrastructure.

We may suspend or close accounts that abuse the service. We will tell you why if we do.

The diagnostic is a structured reflection tool grounded in published academic literature. It is not a clinical instrument and does not diagnose any mental health, learning, or psychological condition. It is not a substitute for therapy, supervision, or professional career advice.

The service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Doctoral Compass and its founders are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of or related to your use of the service, including but not limited to academic, career, financial, or emotional outcomes you may attribute to insights gained from the diagnostic or the report.

The framework — the five dimensions, the twelve archetypes, the question bank, the scoring algorithm, the report templates, and all related text and visuals — is the intellectual property of Doctoral Compass. You may share archetype detail pages and the framework page via standard public links. You may not copy the framework into a paid product or training without an explicit licence.

Your responses to the diagnostic are yours. We hold them on your behalf to generate your report and (with your account) to maintain your re-take history. You may delete them at any time from your dashboard via "Delete my account," which removes your account and every test response within seconds.

We will update these terms when the service materially changes — most notably when a new paid product launches or the terms of an existing one change. The "Last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent change.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Kingdom of Morocco. Any dispute that cannot be resolved by good-faith discussion will be brought before the competent courts of Casablanca, Morocco. For users in the European Union, mandatory consumer-protection rules of your country of residence continue to apply where they grant you greater protection than these terms.

For any question about these terms: tahar@doctoralcompass.com.