School system resources

How the Ivy League Broke America

Today, Turnitin, a leading provider of technology solutions in academic integrity, announced it will expand its offerings to advance classroom digitization through AI-powered grading, enhanced AI writing detection and customizable individual feedback for students. The launch includes a Paper to Digital add-on, helping educators provide faster online grading for paper assignments, ensuring prompt feedback to students, and an enhanced Similarity Report to help educators identify when content generated by AI writing tools may have been submitted. Education-related AI is predicted to be a $6 billion market by next year. Yet, according to Tyton Partners, students continue to lead in regular GenAI adoption rates at 59 percent compared to approximately 40 percent of instructors and administrators. The 2024-2025 school year is anticipated to be the year of AI, and educators need resources that help them adopt the technology in the classroom. “This school year, AI will likely be in every classroom,” said Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer, Turnitin. “Yet, there’s still a disconnect between students and educators about what constitutes acceptable generative AI use andaccess to technology to support learning. Turnitin is helping to address these challenges by providing teachers and administrators with new offerings to adapt to AI’s ever-evolving role in education, and supporting ethical AI usage for students.” googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1683043210496-0'); }); New Paper to Digital add-on improves grading accuracy and consistency AI in education goes far beyond plagiarism detection. If used correctly, this technology can simplify the challenges of grading paper-based assessments, and eliminate unintended bias while streamlining customized feedback for students and improving the learning process overall. A recent preprint paper by University of Michigan researchers revealed a significant correlation across 30 million grading records: students with surnames lower in the alphabet tend to receive lower grades. This bias stems from sequential grading practices compounded by the default alphabetical ordering of student submissions in learning management systems. The new Paper to Digital add-on for Turnitin Feedback Studio uses handwriting recognition, AI-assisted grouping and horizontal (question by question) grading of paper quizzes, tests and assignments. By streamlining grading and strengthening the consistency of instructor feedback, institutions can foster a fairer and more effective assessment environment. The new innovative tool also offers faster feedback, enhanced security and integration directly into learning management systems (LMS). Enhanced Similarity Report helps identify AI-Generated content In April 2023, Turnitin launched its AI writing detection feature to help educators identify AI-generated content in student work while safeguarding students’ interests. Since the launch, Turnitin has sourced pedagogical feedback from educators and administrators to inform product improvement and additional tech support features. As a result, Turnitin’s enhanced Similarity Report provides a new foundation for Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature. The tool helps educators identify unoriginal or improperly cited student writing, facilitating productive conversations on proper citation practices and accidental plagiarism. The new report has been thoughtfully redesigned with an intuitive interface and new categorization of match types, making it easier to interpret and use as a formative learning tool to strengthen academic writing skills. This update comes shortly after the launch of Turnitin’s AI paraphrasing detection feature, which is integrated within Turnitin’s AI writing capabilities – as an Originality add-on – enabling educators and publishers to identify when AI paraphrasing tools may have been used to modify AI-generated text to avoid detection.

Know your students: High-quality learning is fundamentally relational, not transactional, despite higher education looking increasingly transactional in nature (I won't rant about that issue here). While getting to know students can be challenging in large cohorts and/or with a high reliance on sessional staff, finding ways to connect with students individually can make a significant difference in promoting academic integrity and provide insight into the individual trajectories students are on in their learning. Yes, I know, much easier said than done.Be transparent about AI use: Whether using a system of "lanes," like Professor Danny Liu’s two-lane approach, the multi-lane highway approach outlined by UNSW’s Professor Alex Steel, the AI Assessment Scale developed by Leon Furze, Dr Mike Perkins, Dr Jasper Roe SFHEA and Dr. Jason MacVaugh or another framework, be absolutely explicit about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate use of AI in your units/subjects. My sense is that coordinators are best placed to make these calls, which takes us back to the awareness-raising piece above. Clear guidelines can help students navigate this new terrain ethically but this kind of guidance is often lacking (partly because we have been trying to figure all this out, of course).Ask students to show their working: If students are permitted to use AI tools, require them to document their process. The calculator analogy doesn’t work with generative AI for a range of reasons but ‘show us your working’ is a useful heuristic here, as it was when calculators appeared on the scene. This approach could include sharing the prompts they used, the outputs they received, and how they incorporated this information into their final work. This approach not only discourages misuse but also helps students develop critical skills in working with AI and gives us some insight into how these tools can be used in the tasks we assign.Engage in conversations with students as assessment: Consider incorporating more oral assessments or discussions into your assessment. While this may be challenging in large cohorts, even small-scale implementation can provide valuable insights into students' understanding and thought processes that may not be evident in written work alone. I have resisted this one because of the challenges I face in implementing this approach in a cohort of 250 students, but I have changed my mind on this and will give it a go. I have been convinced by the argument that we can learn a lot more about how a student is going in a 15-minute chat with them than in spending an hour or more looking at the distant echoes of their progress in a written artefact.

Under the new guidelines, digital text, images, audio, videos, documents, controls and animations must meet a series of “success criteria.” Per reporting from Community College Daily, these include: “Content should not be limited to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape. Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media. Captions are provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media. Audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media. Non-text content should have an equivalent text alternative. Colors used are bold enough to be seen on the screen.”