Annie Chechitelli is the Chief Product Officer at Turnitin, where she oversees the Turnitin suite of applications, including academic integrity, grading and feedback, and assessment capabilities.
Turnitin is a worldwide company dedicated to making sure the integrity of education and meaningfully improving learning outcomes. For 25 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to advertise honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Turnitin products are utilized by educational institutions and certification and licensing programs to uphold integrity and increase learning performance, and by students and professionals to do their best, original work.
How has the introduction of AI writing tools like ChatGPT impacted academic integrity?
ChatGPT’s worldwide accessibility has created latest potential outlets for educational misconduct, including AI generated writing, plagiarism, and paraphrasing, at an enormous scale that only continues to grow. For educators, the flexibility to differentiate between AI and human generated content is barely getting harder. In consequence, ensuring students are creating their best, original work goes far beyond detection. Educators need the flexibility to intervene before misconduct occurs so as to reinforce academic integrity and ethical writing practices. AI isn’t going away, and the brand new age of educational integrity requires a sturdy understanding from each students and teachers on how AI will be used responsibly to support human learning and decisions.
At Turnitin, we’re committed to helping students and educators alike understand the role of AI in education, including identifying misconduct issues and assessing how it may be best integrated into the classroom. In viewing AI writing in education through the lens of only one puzzle piece – identifying AI writing in students’ submissions – institutions and educators are missing the total picture, because AI can profit learning as well. This technology has the flexibility to reinforce human ideas and facilitate a greater understanding of complex topics if used appropriately. AI itself isn’t a threat to original considering or academic integrity so long as students know learn how to use the tools ethically. Its educators responsibility to assist provide their students with the guidance on what’s and what just isn’t a permissible use of the technology – a skillset that can help them beyond the classroom and into their future professions.
What specific challenges do educators face in detecting AI-generated and paraphrased content?
Higher education students’ use of AI far outpaces educators’ use of the technology. Turnitin partnered with Tyton Partners* and located that of the scholars surveyed, 59% say they use AI writing tools a minimum of once a month, while as for administrators 40%, and 36% for instructors. A scarcity of familiarity with these tools leaves educators at midnight on AI’s abilities and limitations.
Moreover, AI use just isn’t nearly AI-generated content anymore. AI paraphrasing has taken off and is the most recent method some use to avoid detection. Educators need support tools that sustain with AI’s latest advancements and supply insight right into a student’s workflow and thought process.
These features will not be meant to switch the educator’s skilled discretion, but somewhat to provide additional insights to assist reach a call. Reports, comparable to ours, provide data points and resources to support a technique of working with students, not determinations of misconduct.
As an alternative, our AI writing and paraphrasing tools are designed to support educators in initiating constructive conversations with students in regards to the importance of ethical writing practices and the right use of paraphrasing techniques.
We’re also constructing a brand new solution for student writing to offer each educators and students confidence within the authenticity of labor by specializing in “proof of process.” Coupled with our existing plagiarism and AI checks, our goal with this solution is to offer educators confidence and insight without burden, and offer students comfort in knowing their exertions won’t be judged solely by a rating. That product will likely be utilized by a select few universities later this yr.
*Turnitin was a partner in providing compensation to conduct Tyton’s Time for Class 2024: Unlocking Access to Effective Digital Teaching & Learning.
Are you able to explain how Turnitin’s latest AI paraphrasing detection feature works?
AI paraphrasing refers back to the technique of using AI technology to rewrite text while retaining the unique meaning. These AI-powered tools, also often called text spinners, analyze the input text and generate alternative versions that convey the identical information using different words or sentence structures. The goal – to make AI-generated text go undetected.
Nonetheless, Turnitin’s AI paraphrasing detection feature identifies instances where AI paraphrasing could have been used to switch AI-generated text in submitted content, helping publishers and educators to take care of the integrity of research writing and foster authentic learning experiences for college kids.
Throughout the platform, the AI writing report highlights the text segments that the model predicts were likely written by an AI tool. Individually, it also highlights AI-generated text that will have been further modified using an AI paraphrasing tool, so educators and publishers can understand the nuances of detection.
How have your previous roles at AWS and Amazon, particularly in education technology and digital content distribution, influenced your approach to developing and enhancing Turnitin’s AI paraphrasing detection feature?
Throughout my profession, I even have all the time focused on the customer-first mentality: continually evolving, responding to the market and identifying customer needs and feedback. This can be a mentality I even have carried with me into my role at Turnitin and is at the guts of our product development strategy.
Technology has all the time modified at a rapid pace and the identical will be said about AI. Following the launch of our AI writing detector, Turnitin heard from educators across the globe that students were attempting to bypass detection through the use of paraphrasing tools. Students and researchers could have used AI paraphrasing to switch AI-generated content, including content produced by language models like ChatGPT, in an try to evade detection by AI detection software.
In turn, we developed our AI paraphrasing tool in July of 2023, in search of to handle this issue by identifying instances where AI paraphrasing could have been used to switch AI-generated text in submitted content. Our goal is to assist publishers and educators maintain the integrity of research writing and foster authentic learning experiences for college kids, especially ahead of the 2024-2025 school yr.
In what ways can Turnitin Originality help institutions maintain high standards of educational integrity amidst the rise of AI writing and contract cheating?
Turnitin Originality has set a completely latest standard for educational integrity for each students and educators. It goes beyond plagiarism to handle latest and changing types of misconduct, like AI writing, contract cheating and paraphrasing, and provides educators with clear, actionable data for tracking student performance across their cohort and assessing potential misconduct issues.
Students also receive support through real-time formative feedback on their work. Originality compares text similarity, grammar, and citations as students work, helping them make corrections and avoid unintentional plagiarism before final submission.
What feedback have you ever received from educators and institutions in regards to the effectiveness of Turnitin’s AI writing and paraphrasing detection tools?
Recently, Turnitin sat down with Dr. Leslie Layne, an associate professor on the University of Lynchburg, Virginia (USA). Layne has taught 76 freshman writing classes and has used Turntitin since starting on the university in Fall 2004.
Reflecting on the challenges before the arrival of efficient AI writing detection tools, Layne recalls, “It was really time-consuming to repeat and paste text into online detectors.” This process, while obligatory, was removed from efficient and 100% accurate, underscoring the necessity for more streamlined and reliable solutions. The introduction of Turnitin’s AI writing detection tool was a game-changer, providing consistency and a much-needed ease of process.
“Grading essays takes time. I’m very wonderful tuned to the period of time that it takes to get done what I would like to get done, so I used to be absolutely delighted to listen to that Turnitin was incorporating AI writing detection, because then every part is in a single place,” said Layne.
A central theme in Layne’s approach is the constructive use of AI in education. Quite than viewing AI as a threat to academic integrity, she advocates for its integration into the educational process. “I do teach with AI in my freshman writing classroom, so I’m having them use ChatGPT in almost every class period,” she explains. This hands-on approach with AI equips students with the abilities to navigate and leverage these tools each effectively and ethically.
How does the Draft Coach™ feature integrate with Turnitin’s other tools to support students in producing original work and improving their writing skills?
The Draft Coach™ feature exists throughout the Originality product. Similar to Originality supports teachers in upholding academic integrity, Draft Coach provides students with guidance on learn how to improve their academic writing and research skills in any respect times. Quick feedback on text similarity, grammar, and paraphrasing helps them avoid accidental plagiarism.
What role do you see AI playing in the longer term of educational integrity, and the way is Turnitin preparing to handle potential latest challenges?
AI writing tools have the potential to make our lives easier, including enhancing and tailoring content, bridging language barriers, increasing productivity, and assisting with brainstorming. Nonetheless, before someone can reap the advantages of those tools, they need to grasp learn how to use them responsibly and ethically. The classroom will be a part of the answer. It’s a protected space for college kids to learn, practice, take probabilities, and grow with technology. The lecture hall can function an amazing training ground for college kids to grasp its ethical boundaries, safely experiment, learn to discern between facts and inaccurate information, and strengthen critical considering skills.
To assist educators and institutions navigate the brand new reality, they need trusted partners, like Turnitin, who understand their needs and people of their students. Actually, two years prior to the general public launch of ChatGPT, Turnitin began working on learn how to provide educators with a tool that provides them transparency into the usage of AI writing so that they can guide students to make use of AI responsibly and support academic integrity.
As AI evolves, Turnitin’s products will too. Recent features will be easily integrated into existing products and workflows for ease of shoppers’ use and a decreased learning curve. We commonly provide updated student, educator and institutional resources to assist them navigate this latest technology and sentence-level detection data.
Finally, a variety of our employees have a background in education, which ensures our products are pedagogically sound. Without their insights, we wouldn’t give you the chance to fulfill the evolving needs of educators and administrators. With all of this in mind, our upcoming “proof of process” solution, which will likely be integrated into existing Turnitin workflows, will give each educators and students confidence within the authenticity of labor.
What advice would you give to educators and institutions looking to boost their academic integrity policies within the face of evolving AI technologies?
My opinion on academic policies is that having multiple AI policies at different institutional levels is a key method to ensure situational nuances are accounted for. For instance, an AI policy for a creative writing class might not be one of the best method to approach potential AI use on a research paper. Instructors creating assignment-level policies should provide details on acceptable AI use based on the project’s learning objectives.
On the institutional level, nevertheless, academic integrity policies must be broad with a deal with how students represent their work and cite their sources. This prevents intentional plagiarism while giving space to nuances related to the unique situation.
Across the board, it’s crucial to look beyond a single detection percentage. Our tools are designed to support institutions and educators, not replace them entirely. Teachers know their students best, and may use any detection of AI to facilitate productive conversations about appropriate AI usage and demanding considering.
With the intention to best support educators, Turnitin also has an enormous library of resources and an expansive teacher network available to assist institutions construct out their policies, including a available guide that shares detailed insights on learn how to review and revise existing academic integrity policies to handle threats from AI, available online to download freed from charge.
