Is there a document that sets out the different user roles and their powers? I set up my students as “Authors” and they seem to be able to make their stories public.
Here’s the documentation for the default user roles (Super, Admin, Contributor, Researcher):
And here are the docs for roles added by the More User Roles plugin (Author, Editor):
Authors are able to publish their own content by design. You could downgrade the users to Contributors if you don’t want them to be able to publish.