It’s difficult to keep up with AI in education. It’s not only the pace of change but its breadth. The seemingly endless potential implications. The other day an email from Grammarly arrived in my bulging AI email inbox. Having just discussed this software with a colleague, I thought I should give it a cursory glance. I’m glad I did, as this wasn’t an update on the Grammarly I was familiar with (spell check on steroids), but a new product, Grammarly Authorship. Delving a little deeper, I was struck with the realisation that we had reached a landmark point for academic integrity in the era of AI.
For those of you not familiar with Grammarly Authorship, it has three unique functions:
1. Analytics - an overview highlighting the percentage written by the student.
2. Report - a full colour coded text of the writing, e.g. human written, copy and pasted, AI generated.
3. Replay - providing a time stamped replay of the student writing the assignment detailing time spent on sections and origin of the text.
The first two are clearly not too distant from similar offerings from other companies. The third, however, proposes something different altogether. Like the instant replay on Monday Night Football or VAR on Match of the Day, it is now possible to view an instant replay of the student constructing their text. We are well and truly through the looking glass now, Alice….
Prove where your words have come from
I wasn’t wholly surprised with this development; it seems the logical extension of the technological arms race. Currently, Authorship is marketed for student use to “prove where your words come from” by sharing the authorship replay with staff to help avoid plagiarism or false authorship accusations (e.g. contract cheating or AI use). This, however, is in the beta phase, and I wouldn’t be surprised if staff could eventually get their hands on the tech - when transparency becomes surveillance.
From a pragmatic perspective, this tech could no doubt be of use. Access to an instant replay of a student writing assignment could potentially make academic misconduct cases a lot easier and also be a valuable tool to reflect on where an assessment went wrong (or right). Students could defend themselves and staff could view student work as it is written. In my experience, a misconduct panel considering a serious case of false authorship is hesitant to make a decision based on the balance of probabilities, preferring a smoking gun in terms of evidence - an errant insert student name here or as of my latest knowledge update. A video replay may, in fact, not be a million miles from students providing tracked changes or supporting notes for their essay - or not providing them, due to mysteriously wiped document histories, corrupted hard drives or vanishing laptops. If effective, a surveillance tool could save a lot of time on academic misconduct cases which potentially cost millions to the economy every year (Khaleel et al., 2024).
The majority are honest the majority of the time
Research on academic misconduct has some seemingly shocking statistics, showing its high prevalence and that much of the more serious offences go undetected (e.g. Newton, 2018; Curtis, 2021). Despite this, the research findings back up my academic integrity mantra that “the majority of students are honest the majority of the time.” This has helped me cope with the stress of dealing with academic misconduct cases in a constructive manner. As Dawson (2024) recently critiqued, much of what is now held under the banner of academic integrity is actually aimed at assessment security. It seems the case that Grammarly’s Authorship Replay is a form of digital proctoring or invigilation - turning an essay into a form of closed examination for the AI era. It is a symptom of the wider issue of increased digital surveillance which people are under, in their homes, in the streets, online.
Integrity is a fuzzy term, but a common description is “integrity is what you do when no-one is looking” (1). What does the capability for constant surveillance therefore mean for academic integrity, student agency, privacy and learning? Thi Nguyen (2022) notes that trust is a delicate dance. He posits that transparency and surveillance arise from distrust and act with epistemic intrusiveness by eliminating “the non-explicit and the private…where corruption and bias live — but also sensitivity, expertise, and intimacy.” With this in mind, such crude solutions to assessment security do not ensure the core values of academic integrity. Furthermore, there is a strong argument to be made that previous technological solutions to text matching actually prevented academic writing and assessment from moving on with technology. While a video replay may help with academic misconduct cases, what does it mean for learning and building trust in this new era of AI?
References
Bailey, J. (2024). Grammarly Announces New Authorship Verification Tool. Plagiarism Today, 22 August, 2024.
Curtis, G. J., M. McNeill, C. Slade, K. Tremayne, R. Harper, K. Rundle, and R. Greenaway. (2021). Moving beyond Self-Reports to Estimate the Prevalence of Commercial Contract Cheating: An Australian Study. Studies in Higher Education 47 (9): 1844–1856.
Dawson, P., Bearman, M., Dollinger, M., & Boud, D. (2024). Validity matters more than cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 1005-1016.
Ofgang, E. (2024). Grammarly Authorship: I Tested The New AI and Plagiarism Tool. Tech & Learning, 6 November, 2024.
Khaleel, F., Harte, P. and Borthwick Saddler, H. (2024).The financial impact of AI on institutions through breaches of academic integrity. HEPI Blog, 1 March 2024.
Newton, P. M. (2018, August). How common is commercial contract cheating in higher education and is it increasing? A systematic review. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 3, p. 67).
(1) A paraphrase of a Charles Marshall quote: “Integrity is doing the right thing when you don’t have to—when no one else is looking or will ever know—when there will be no congratulations or recognition for having done so”.
Dr Stephen Gow is the Leverhulme Research Fellow on the StudentXGenAI project at Edinburgh Napier University and Chair of the UK’s Northern Academic Integrity Forum.
The author’s views are their own.
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