Terms & privacy

Who we are

CST Practice (cstpractice.com) is an independent practice website. You can reach us at contact@cstpractice.com.

Agreeing to these terms

By signing in or using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.

What the site is

CST Practice is an independent practice tool for the aptitude tests used in Irish Core Surgical Training (CST) selection. It has no link with the organisers of any test, who have neither approved nor sponsored it. Every example is made by the site; none is a real test question. Practising can help, but we cannot promise any result in a real test.

Your account

• You sign in with your Google or Microsoft account. Keep it secure; you are responsible for what is done with your account.
• An account is for one person. It can be signed in on one device at a time: signing in somewhere else signs out the first device.
• You can stop using the site at any time, and ask us to delete your account (see the Privacy Policy).

Plans

The free plan gives a limited number of practice examples a day; it may be paused from time to time. Full access is not on sale yet and is given by invitation only; once it is, it will be sold as the pass described under Payments below.

Payments

• A pass costs €25 and gives 3 months of full access to the account that buys it. The price shown is the full price you pay.
• It is paid once. It is not a subscription: nothing renews and you are never charged again. Buying another pass before the first ends adds 3 months on to it.
• Payments are handled by Stripe on its own payment page; we never see or store your card details. Each payment comes with an invoice, which you can download from the Plans page while signed in.
• Full access starts as soon as the payment goes through. Online purchases normally come with a 14-day right to cancel, but for digital services that start straight away it ends once they start. Before paying, you are asked to agree that your access starts at once and that this ends that right.
• If full access does not work as described and we cannot fix it, or you are charged by mistake, write to contact@cstpractice.com and we will put it right or refund you. Your rights as a consumer under Irish and EU law are not affected.
• If we close an account for breaking these terms, the time left on its pass is not refunded.

Fair use

Please do not:

• share your account, or try to get round the daily limits, the plans or the sign-in;
• collect examples from the site in bulk, by hand or with automated tools;
• copy, publish or sell the examples, tips, guides or pictures (see the copyright notice);
• disrupt the site or use it to break the law.

We may suspend or close an account that does any of these.

Feedback you send

The feedback form is anonymous. By sending a post you let us use it to improve the practice. Describe what the examples were like in your own words: do not copy real test questions, and do not share anything you agreed with a test organiser to keep confidential, or any personal details.

The site as it is

We work to keep the site running and the examples correct, but it is provided as it is, and it may change, pause for maintenance or stop. As far as the law allows, we are not liable for indirect losses, or for decisions you make based on your practice results. Nothing in these terms limits rights you have as a consumer that cannot be limited by law.

Changes and law

We may update these terms; the date at the top shows the latest version, and important changes will be shown on the site. These terms are governed by the laws of Ireland.

We keep as little about you as we can. Data protection law (the GDPR) gives you rights over it, set out below. CST Practice decides how your data is used (it is the data controller). For any question or request about your data, write to contact@cstpractice.com.

What we keep

• Your account: the e-mail address your Google or Microsoft account shares when you sign in, your plan, which sign-in currently holds the account, and when it was created. The sign-in service also keeps the details your provider shares with it (such as your name and picture).
• Payments: for each pass you buy, the amount, the day and until when it gave full access. Stripe, who takes the payment, keeps your payment details under its own privacy policy and tells us only that you paid. We keep payment records for 6 years, as tax law requires, even if your account is deleted.
• Daily counts: how many practice examples, reports and feedback posts your account used each day, so the daily limits work.
• Feedback posts: what you write in the feedback form, with the test it was about, the month you sat it (if you say) and the day it arrived. A post is saved without your account, e-mail or name; only the daily count above knows that you sent one.
• Technical logs: our hosting provider records requests (such as IP address and browser) to run the site and keep it secure.
• Visit counts: Cloudflare Web Analytics counts which pages are visited, the site a visit came from, the kind of device and browser, and how fast pages load. It uses no cookies, does not keep your IP address and does not follow you across other sites, so it cannot tell who you are.

What we do not keep

Your test and practice results are never sent to us: they stay in your browser while you are signed in, and are deleted from it when you sign out. If you e-mail yourself the PDF report, it is made in your browser and passed straight on to your own address; we do not store a copy. We use no advertising and no tracking.

Cookies and browser storage

We only store what the site needs to work: your sign-in (in browser storage, and as a cookie so the server can check it before showing the test pages), your results while you are signed in, and your light or dark choice. As these are strictly necessary, we do not ask for consent to them.

Why we use it

• To give you your account and plan, to take payment for a pass, and to keep the account to one person and one device (to provide the service you signed up for).
• To keep payment records (a legal obligation).
• To keep the site secure, apply the daily limits and stop spam, and to improve the site from anonymous feedback and visit counts (our legitimate interests).

Who helps us

Your data is never sold or used for marketing. These providers process it for us, only to run the site: Supabase (sign-in and our database), Cloudflare (hosting, security and visit counts), Stripe (payments), Resend (sends the PDF report to your own e-mail address when you ask for it, without keeping it), and Google or Microsoft (the sign-in you choose, under their own privacy policies). Some of them may process data outside the European Economic Area, under safeguards the GDPR allows.

How long we keep it

Your account and its daily counts are kept until you ask us to delete them. Payment records are kept for 6 years. Feedback posts, which are not linked to anyone, are kept for as long as they help improve the practice. Technical logs are kept for a short time by our hosting provider.

Your rights

You can ask to see the data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to receive a copy, or to object to how we use it. Write to contact@cstpractice.com; we answer within one month. You can also complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland (dataprotection.ie).

Changes

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top and show important changes on the site.