Skip to main content

What other people can see about you

Purpose​

A plain answer to "who sees my answers?", and what you can and cannot change afterwards.

Who this is for​

Anyone completing an assessment, or deciding whether to.

The short version​

  • The organisation running the campaign can see your answers.
  • Reviewers assigned to you can see your answers and can add notes to them.
  • Other participants cannot see your answers.
  • Nothing is public unless the organisers deliberately publish it.
  • If the organisers turn results on for respondents, what you see back is your own unit's result — your organisation's when the assessment is answered once per organisation, your own when it is answered individually — plus, sometimes, an anonymous comparison against the other organisations in the wave. No report offered to a respondent ever names another person or carries another person's answers.

What is stored​

When you complete an assessment, what is kept is:

  • your answers;
  • the email address the assessment was filed under, if there was one;
  • when you started and when you submitted;
  • which campaign and which assessment it belongs to.

If you opened a bare public link and were never asked for an email address, the submission is not attached to a person at all — until you sign in on the same device and choose to link it.

Who can see it​

The account running the campaign. Administrators and campaign managers can see the participant list, submission counts, and the answers behind them.

Reviewers assigned to you. An auditor is assigned to specific participants or specific assessments and sees only those. They can mark each of your answers as verified, record a corrected value as modified, and attach a note.

Reviewers' managers. Notes an auditor marks shared are visible to campaign managers in a shared-notes feed. Notes marked private are not.

Other participants. Nothing.

What you can see​

Reviewer feedback. When an auditor ticks "share with participant" on an answer, that answer's verdict, any corrected value and any note appear to you — on the assessment's confirmation page, under Reviewer feedback. You may also get an email saying feedback is ready. That email's link works only in the browser you completed the assessment in, because that is how the system recognises the submission as yours.

Only the answers a reviewer explicitly shares are shown. Silence is not a verdict.

Your application. If you applied through a registration form while signed in, you can reopen your application, see your answers, and edit them while it is still pending. Once a decision has been recorded the page becomes read-only and says so. If you applied without signing in, there is currently no self-service page for you — contact the organisers to change anything.

What you cannot change​

You cannot edit a submitted assessment. If something is wrong, ask the organisers: an auditor can reopen a submission, which lets you answer again.

Stopping, deleting, and how long things are kept​

These are three different things, and the difference matters.

Withdrawing — "stop using my data"​

You can leave a study at any time, including after you have submitted. The action is "Withdraw from this study", on your assessments page and at the end of any questionnaire you were invited to. It asks you to confirm first, and tells you what it does before you press it.

Once you withdraw:

  • nothing further is asked of you;
  • your own answers are left out of every report produced from that date onward;
  • you get an email confirming it.

Two things it does not do, and both are worth knowing before you decide:

  • It does not delete anything. Your answers are still held; they simply stop being used. If you want them deleted as well, that is a separate request — see below.
  • It does not withdraw an answer your organisation filed. Some assessments are answered once per organisation or per department. That submission is the organisation's record rather than yours, and one person cannot take it back on everyone's behalf.

Reports that were already finished and circulated before you withdrew do not change. Nobody can un-send a spreadsheet, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Erasure — "delete my response"​

Ask the organisation running the campaign. An administrator there can permanently erase a submission, and when they do it goes with everything attached to it: any files you uploaded, and any notes a reviewer wrote on your answers. It cannot be undone.

Two things stay behind, and you should ask about them separately if they matter to you:

  • Your contact record, if the organisation keeps one. That is their own record of you as a person, not a copy of your answers, and erasing a response does not touch it.
  • Anything already exported. If someone downloaded a spreadsheet last month, that file is on their computer and is outside what any deletion here can reach.

If you answered anonymously and kept your access code, you can delete your own submission with it, without asking anyone — see getting back in. That only works while we genuinely cannot tell who you are; once an email address is attached to a response, deleting it is the organisation's to do, because the alternative would let anyone holding a code destroy someone else's work.

Retention — how long it is kept​

Each campaign decides, and the campaigns you are in may differ. Two separate periods exist: one for anonymous responses and one for responses with a name attached. Either can be set to keep indefinitely, and that is the default.

You are told the period that applies to you, at the moment it becomes relevant:

  • if you answered anonymously, the date is shown beside your access code, and the code stops working on the same day the answers go — so you never lose the right while the data is still held;
  • if the campaign knows who you are, the date is on the confirmation screen after you submit. When a campaign keeps responses indefinitely, that screen says so rather than staying silent.

When a period runs out, the response is erased in exactly the way an administrator's deletion erases one — attachments and reviewer notes included. You are not removed from the participant list by it; the response ages out, not you.

When the answer is your organisation's, not yours​

Some assessments are answered once per organisation, or once per department or project, rather than once per person. If you are on such an assessment:

  • You and your colleagues share one answer. Whoever opens it first starts it; anyone else in the same organisation or department opens the same part-finished form and can carry on. The most recent save is what is kept, exactly as it would be if one person moved between a laptop and a phone — there is no merge, so agree between you who is filling it in.
  • Only one of you can submit it. Once it is submitted, the assessment is done for everyone in that organisation or department. If you try to submit as well, you are told it has already been completed, by whom, and when.
  • If an auditor reopens it, any of you can make the correction. It is the organisation's answer that was sent back, not one person's.
  • It stays with the organisation if you leave. Asking to withdraw from a study stops your own data being used from that date onward, and it does not delete an answer your organisation filed — that submission is the organisation's record, not yours alone. Deleting it is a separate request, and only the organisation running the campaign can make it.

If your record does not say which organisation or department you belong to, you answer for yourself instead, under the ordinary one-submission-per-person rule. The same is true if it names two departments — the system will not guess which one you are answering for. Ask the organisers to correct your record if either is wrong.

When results are published​

Organisers can publish a campaign's results to a public web link that needs no sign-in. They choose what goes into it:

  • Aggregate only — counts of completed submissions per assessment, and nothing about individuals. This is the default.
  • With answers, anonymised — answer content is included, but people appear as "Participant 1", "Participant 2" and so on.
  • With answers, identified — names, email addresses and answers are all publicly visible.

The published page states which of the three it is, in plain words, in the summary block at the head of the report. If you need to know whether a campaign you are in will be published and how, ask the organisers before you submit — the setting is theirs, not yours.

Your account details​

Your name and profile picture come from your BIMei identity, not from Assessor.io. Change them in your BIMei account and they update here.