Help & FAQ

How this site is supposed to be used

fake.degree contains two distinct products that share a domain. One of them is the novelty diploma generator, which produces images of fictional academic credentials conferred by entirely fictional institutions. The diplomas are watermarked, the watermark is permanent, and every diploma carries a small printed line at the bottom identifying it as a novelty. The other product is the plain-text resume builder, which produces a serious, machine-readable resume that real employers can read through the software they actually use to screen applications. The two products are visually similar because they share the site's styling. They are functionally very different. The diplomas are jokes. The resume builder is not.

If you came here from a search for novelty diploma generators, you are in the right place. Browse the catalog, pick a degree that suits your sense of humor, type the name you would like on the document, and the site will generate a printable image. You can print it on cardstock, frame it, hand it to a colleague as a gag gift, or share a screenshot in a group chat with people who will appreciate it. You cannot, and must not, submit it to any employer, school, licensing body, or government agency. That use is a form of fraud. We will cooperate with any investigation of such use.

If you came here from a search for free resume builders, you are also in the right place. The resume builder lives at the address slash resume slash. It is free, no account is needed, and you can return to a previously saved resume via the unique link the site assigns to it. The export is plain text, which is the format most friendly to applicant tracking software. The visual layout in the browser is clean and printable. Both formats are intended to clear the first invisible filter in the modern hiring pipeline.

Account questions

An account is optional. The diploma generator and the resume builder both work without one. The reason you might want an account is if you intend to come back to the same resume across sessions and would prefer not to bookmark the unique link the site assigned to it. If you do register, your saved resumes and diploma requests show up on a small dashboard at the address slash account slash. The account is not tied to any payment, subscription, or paid tier. The site has no paid tier.

To register, visit the registration page and submit an email address, an optional username, and a password of at least twelve characters. If you skip the username, the site will use the part of your email before the at sign as your username. If that username is already in use, the site will tell you so without telling you whether your specific email is in use. This phrasing is deliberate; revealing whether a particular email is registered would leak information about every visitor.

To sign in, visit the sign-in page and use either your email or your username along with your password. If you fail to sign in too many times in a row, the account will be locked for a short cooling-off period. Wait the period out, then try again. If you have genuinely forgotten the password, write to the support address and we will reset it manually. The site does not yet have a self-service password reset flow.

Newsletter

The weekly credentials newsletter is the small editorial product attached to this site. Subscribers receive one short email per week containing a single fresh fake credential along with a brief satirical write-up. The email is sent once and only once per week, the unsubscribe link is in every email, and the subscriber list is stored only on our own servers. We do not sell the list. We do not rent the list. We do not share the list with any third party. If you no longer want to receive the newsletter, click the unsubscribe link or write to the support address.

Subscription happens in two places. There is a standalone signup form on the home page that captures only the email address. There is also an optional checkbox on every diploma generator form and on the resume builder form. The two paths feed the same list and the same deduplication rules apply, which means you cannot subscribe twice from two different forms and end up receiving the newsletter twice. The system reconciles duplicates automatically.

Privacy and data

We keep what we collect to a minimum. The diploma generator stores the name you type so that the rendered diploma page can be revisited later. The resume builder stores the resume itself. The newsletter signup stores the email and the time of signup. Standard server logs capture the IP address, the request path, and the timestamp of every request, and those logs are retained for thirty days. We do not run any third-party analytics tracker without your consent. We do display advertising from Google AdSense, and those ads serve in non-personalized mode until you accept the consent banner that appears at the bottom of every page.

If you would like a copy of the data we have stored about you, or if you would like that data deleted, write to the support address. We will respond within seven days. The full privacy policy is available at slash privacy slash and the terms of service are at slash terms slash. Both documents are short, written in plain English, and worth reading in full before submitting any data to the site.

Reporting a problem

If a page is broken, if an image is not rendering, if a diploma you generated yesterday is no longer accessible at the link you bookmarked, write to the support address with the URL, a short description of what you tried to do, and the time at which the problem occurred. Screenshots are helpful but not required. Most reports are acknowledged within one business day. Most problems are fixed within three.

If you believe the site is being used to commit fraud — for example, if you have received a diploma from this site that someone is attempting to pass off as a genuine credential — write to the support address with as much detail as you can provide. We take these reports seriously, we respond promptly, and we cooperate with employers, schools, and licensing authorities who need confirmation that a particular document is a novelty rather than a genuine credential.