A Brief History of Academic Integrity Tools

We've come a long way from the face-to-face classrooms of our youth.

Today's classrooms increasingly have a digital infrastructure managing submissions, grades, announcements, and integrity. On 10/18, we presented a new thesis for academic integrity tools using an authorship-first approach to writing. During that presentation, we worked to put Cursive and proof of effort tools in the context of the academic integrity tool landscape. Below is a short description of the 'epochs' and a video excerpt of the presentation.

Manual verification

Many classrooms across the US and the World continue to have the proximal and financial ability to coordinate and host live, in-person class sessions, where all students attend, participate and submit work directly to a teacher. In the US, almost all of K12 operates in this manner, and the thousands of residential and commuter college programs facilitate this learning experience. 30+ years ago, this was the norm for all forms of education, and the verification of student work was performed manually.

Paper submissions, blue book examinations, in-classroom tests, and quizzes all could be invigilated by a professor or TA.

Plagiarism Detection

Starting in the late 90s and early 00s, sufficient technological advancements brought on a few innovations that impacted education: nascent learning management system development, including the creations of WebCT (now Blackboard/Anthology), Moodle, and eCollege (Pearson; among others) started to bring aspects of the classroom online, and created new opportunities for distance and online education.

As these grew, so did the need for ways to verify student writing, and the earliest plagiarism detection technologies were developed. These were created to accept digital documents, parse them, store them, and compare them to other similarly stored digital documents, ensuring that student work had an acceptable originality score. The most well-known of these is Turnitin, owned by Advance (the legacy of the Newhouse Family publishing company).

Monitoring and Proctoring

Around the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the increasing number of online classrooms and the growing scale of those courses created new needs, including exam verification. While place-based proctoring centers like Prometric had been available for years, online courses had promised the ability of anytime, anywhere learning. The rise of web-based proctoring companies met this need.

Companies like ProctorU, Examity (both now Meazure Learning), Proctorio, Smowl Tech, MonitorEdu, and others offer easy-to-purchase and use systems that verify student exams one by one leveraging the student's own cheap devices and hardware (webcams).

Authorship

2020 brought a perfect storm of circumstances that raised the need for new approaches to learning verification: 1. the pandemic pushed even face-to-face learning online, and even on the other side of COVID, learning management systems remain a part of the digital infrastructure of even classroom-based courses, 2. the introduction of ChatGPT shocked the world with the ease of creating original, human-like content.

The initial reaction to Generative AI has been more detection using a new tool: the AI Classifier (GPTzero, Turnitin's own, Copyleaks, and many others) verifying the 'human-ness' of submissions via statistical analysis.

Authorship, on the other hand, offers a different approach. One that focuses on 'me-ness' or 'you-ness' instead of 'human-ness.' By focusing on the writing process (think of it as revision history in real-time), we can leverage new data in many beneficial ways (authorship, effort, cognition, quality, and more).

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We're in the early days of a new era for Academic Integrity tools focused on deeper data analysis to tie student effort to submissions. Uses of revision history in documents, proctoring-like tools, or biometric data like key logging, a focus on the process over the product could significantly benefit many aspects of education.