Rethinking Plagiarism Detection

Adapting to the Ai Era in Education

It's time to shift our mindset on how we approach plagiarism in the age of AI. Educators have long believed they can easily catch students who plagiarize papers and punish them for their actions. We think we know our students and their writing styles well enough to detect when they did not write something. However, we need to rethink this assumption in the age of AI.

With students doing most of their writing on computers, we can no longer say we know how they write. Tools like Grammarly, MyWords.ai, Quillbot, WordAi, CogniBypass, TextGhost, StealthGPT, Phrasly.Ai, and WriteHuman.ai have made it easier than ever for students to use generative AI to set their voice and tell it what audience they are writing for.

In fact, some of the most popular AI detector tools like, Turnitin and Originality.Ai are not reliable enough to catch all instances of plagiarism (the video below does a good job explaining just how easy it is to trick them). Rather than focusing on catching students who plagiarize, we should start thinking about creating assignments that make it difficult for plagiarism to occur. Next week, I will discuss an AI tool that can help us achieve this.

And if you have not seen this video about a college student who used Grammarly and was put on academic probation, you need to.