GoIt changing its warranty conditions post-sale
GoIt is an Ukrainian-based online company providing international IT-related educational courses. Some of its courses come with an "employment warranty" (and are advertised as such). This warranty promises to reimburse the price of the course for graduates who, despite their best efforts, failed to secure a job offer in a six-month period after finishing the course.
Following the ongoing IT job market crisis and the full-scale Russian invasion into Ukraine in 2022, GoIt single-handedly changed its warranty conditions, adding a number of additional requirements for those seeking to return their money - including rewriting the contracts for students who were still studying or finished their courses, which amounts to Retroactively amended purchase.
Background[edit | edit source]
A primary service from GoIt featuring "employment warranty" at the time was their Fullstack Developer online course. Lasting 10 months, it included lifetime access to their Learning Management System (LMS) containing text courses, video lessons, tests and other similar elements of the course, as well as weekly online meetings with a mentor and accompanying programming "homework tasks". There were also several major coding "projects" a student or a team was required to finish to wrap up a major part of the course.
Submitting homework and projects before their preassigned deadlines and successfully passing the evaluation of these works served as the criteria for successfully finishing the course. Students who had passed on all the planned tasks were issued a certificate marking their graduation and were provided employment consultation from GoIt-affiliated career service.
[Incident][edit | edit source]
Education contracts formed in 2021 (and possibly before) included the following conditions as prerequisites for an "employment warranty" (i.e. for getting money back if a graduate is unsuccessful in obtaining the job):
- The graduate did not get a job offer in a period of six months after graduating
- The graduate have successfully finished all the homework tasks and three "team projects"
- The graduate listed these three "team projects" in their CV as per career service recommendations
- The graduate did not interrupt the education course.
As late as 2023 GoIt revised its conditions for the "employment warranty", which now included the following:
- The graduate have successfully finished and uploaded all the homework tasks
- The graduate have successfully finished three "team projects" and one "individual project" on React Native.
- The graduate listed these four "projects" in their CV and created a LinkedIn profile in full accordance to the requirements of the career service
- The graduate successfully passed the examination on the entirety of the education course.
- The graduate did not interrupt the education course.
As of 2023, the "old" contract was no longer available at the site, with GoIt directing the students to the text of the new one.
This change poses several issues from a consumer standpoint:
- Current GoIt education program does not include React Native[1]. GoIt Fullstack course covers three "blocks": Frontent Core, Frontend Advanced and React+Node (each one is finished with a "team project"). As of 2025 GoIt LMS includes videos on React Native as an "optional content" but those were not available (and, consequently, could not be mandatory for "employment warranty") back in 2021-2022.
- "Examination" is added as a new requirement. However, no criteria for evaluating this examination are given. It is also unclear who the examinators are; it is implied that these are provided by GoIt. This raises issues about their impartiality since their evaluation of the graduate is directly tied to the application of the "employment warranty" - in other words, it directly influences if GoIt is obligated to return the money paid for the course. No form of appeal is provided. Thus, the examination bears resemblance to Forced arbitration.
- Lack of physical form of the contract makes it harder for the consumer to prove that the change took place.
GoIt's frontpage advertises that "80% of graduates are employed within months after finishing the course". However, no proof is provided for these claims.
GoIt Terms of Use, last edited in May, 2023, explicitly introduce Forced Arbitration and class action waiver in article 10[2].
[Company]'s response[edit | edit source]
Lawsuit[edit | edit source]
Consumer response[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]