"It came from your worksheet." Five words, and they're the strongest thing a platform can say to a tutoring centre. This post is about what has to be true underneath them.
What grounding means
Grounding is the rule that anything made from your material has to trace back to a specific page of it, and say which one. A practice question points to the worksheet and page it was built from. A worked solution points to the notes the method came from. An explanation at 9pm points to the page it drew on.
The opposite is a system that can produce anything. Ask it a question and it answers from everything it has ever read, fluently, whether or not the answer is in your material or true. That's what the hallucination entry in the glossary describes: a confident, well-written, wrong answer, delivered with your logo on it.
Grounding closes that door. If a question can't be traced to a page, it doesn't exist. The grounding entry is the short version, and the rest of this post is the long one.
Every item cites its page
Every question, worked solution, explanation and flashcard carries its source: the document, the page, and where on the page. Not as a footnote for auditors, but as a link you click when something looks odd.
That link is what makes the queue usable. When a converted question reads strangely, you don't have to guess whether the wording was yours or ours. You click through, see the worksheet, and the answer is in front of you. When the answer key doesn't match, the flag comes with the page. When a parent asks why their child was marked wrong on question 7, you open question 7 and the worksheet is beside it.
It's also what makes the material yours in a way that holds up. A question with a source page is a question you could have written, and did. A question without one is a question somebody else wrote and put under your name.
Anything untraceable is rejected
This is the half of the rule that's easy to skip, and it's the half that does the work.
Citing a page is only worth something if the alternative is refusal. So an item that can't be traced back to a page of your material is rejected before it reaches the approval queue. You never see it, not as a suggestion, not as an option, not as something helpfully filled in from elsewhere. If your material doesn't cover a topic, there's a gap where that topic would be, and the gap is honest.
The same rule applies live. When a student is stuck at 9pm on a question your notes don't explain, the explanation says so and suggests asking the tutor on Tuesday. It doesn't reach for the open internet. It doesn't invent a method you don't teach. It would rather say "not covered" than fill the space with something you'd have to unteach.
That's a narrower system than a chatbot, and it's meant to be. Narrow is the feature.
You approve before publish
Grounding gets everything to the queue with its page. Approval is where you decide what leaves it.
Nothing reaches a student until you've said yes. Each batch lands with every item beside its source, mismatches against your key flagged in red, and three choices per item: approve, edit, bin. Approve in bulk when a batch is clean. Edit the wording of anything you'd say differently, and your edit is what publishes. Bin what you don't want. A senior tutor can do this for their own year level if you'd rather delegate.
Unpublished items are invisible to students by design. Not by a setting someone could change, but because there's no path from the queue to a phone that doesn't go through a yes. The approve before publish page has the queue in full.
Owners tend to relax at this step in a walkthrough. It's where the platform stops being an AI tool and becomes their material, organised.
Hints before answers
The last piece is what a student gets when they're stuck, because grounding is only half the worry. The other half is a student who asks for the answer and gets it.
The first response is a hint about the method. The second is a worked example from your notes with different numbers. The third is the full solution. Most students never need the third, and the tutor can see how many each student used, so "needed three hints on every ratios question" is on Monday's screen before Tuesday's class. It won't write an essay and it won't do a whole set. The stuck at 9pm page walks through it on a phone.
Why the sentence is the strongest one
Because everything else a platform can say is about the platform. Fast, easy, branded, secure. Those are good, and the security page goes through the last one properly: your centre's space isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, never shared, never reused, never trained on, and nothing downloading out of it.
"It came from your worksheet" is about you. It says the material is yours, the method is yours, the authorship is yours, and when anyone asks, the page is there. A platform that supplies its own material can't say it, because the material isn't the centre's. A general chatbot can't say it, because there's no page. A platform that writes material for you can't say it, because then it came from them.
It's a sentence that's only true if grounding, rejection, approval and hints are all true underneath it. That's why we protect it.
This week
Take one worksheet and ask yourself where each question would point if it had to. Then send three through convert my worksheets and look at what comes back: every question with its page beside it, flagged where your key disagrees, and nothing that isn't yours.