1. How does Turnitin’s new Paper to Digital add-on improve grading accuracy and consistency for educators?
Despite the rapid advancement of digital tools in education, paper-based assessment continues to play a key role in many academic courses, offering unique benefits that digital methods can’t entirely replicate. However, the traditional approach to managing and grading paper-based assessment often comes with significant logistical and administrative challenges. One of the main drawbacks is how difficult it is to distribute, collect, and grade so many paper assessments; this can be time-consuming and prone to errors through misplaced or lost student work.
With our new Paper to Digital add-on for Turnitin Feedback Studio, instructors can overcome the divide between traditional paper assignments and digital efficiency. This new innovative tool consolidates both paper-based and digital assessments into a unified platform, allowing instructors to manage their assessments without navigating between multiple systems. Paper to Digital also offers faster feedback, enhanced security and integration directly into learning management systems (LMS). Unlike manual review, which can be impractical due to workload constraints, Paper to Digital creates secure, locked digital copies of students’ original submissions. This feature enables instructors to easily reference and verify submissions, identifying any alterations made after grading and ensuring the validity of assessments.
Typically, paper-based assessment requires time-intensive grading processes. Instructors must manually evaluate a variety of assessment types – from short answers to complex diagrams – which can lead to inconsistent quality and quantity of feedback as well as delays in providing timely feedback to students. Turnitin’s Paper to Digital add-on for Feedback Studio represents a pivotal step towards boosting the efficiency of paper-based assessment. This integration not only addresses the logistical challenges associated with paper-based assessment but also enriches the overall educational experience.
2. Can you explain how Turnitin’s enhanced Similarity Report helps educators identify AI-generated content and its role in academic integrity?
Turnitin’s enhanced Similarity Report provides a new foundation for our AI writing detection feature, which helps educators identify AI-generated, unoriginal, or improperly cited student writing, facilitating productive conversations between instructors and students, from proper citation practices and unintentional plagiarism to potential misconduct. The enhanced tool 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. The Similarity Report quantifies how similar a student’s work is to other pieces of writing by highlighting similarities to the world’s largest collection of internet, academic, and student paper content.
The Similarity Report features on-paper highlights, filtration options, and flag insights that allow users to see the source of text matches and identify discrepancies, such as replaced characters or hidden text. These features not only help to identify unoriginal content but also serve as educational resources. For instance, by allowing students to resubmit papers and conduct full source analyses, the Similarity Report promotes formative assessment practices and helps students develop their academic writing and citation skills.
It’s important to note that the Similarity Report should not be used as the sole determinant of plagiarism (only humans can do this). It can flag text for further review, enabling assessors to conclude whether similarities are acceptable or if they are potential cases of improper use. For example, a low similarity score might suggest original content, but it could also raise concerns about contract cheating or likely presence of AI writing. These forms of misconduct highlight the need for institutions to reconsider how they assess proof of learning and measure originality and critical thinking skills.
3. How is Turnitin addressing the disconnect between students and educators regarding acceptable generative AI use in the classroom?
There is a lot at play. Educators are in need of data points and resources to help them diagnose the unsanctioned use of generative AI in student writing. But at the same time, they want to help students incorporate the technology responsibly, all without impeding the development of their critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills. Educators also recognize that AI writing isn’t going anywhere, and will likely affect students’ futures.
Meanwhile, students want to learn how to use AI writing to improve their learning and accelerate their work, but are concerned about being accused of cheating. Students are also concerned about fairness in situations where they are being compared to their peers.
This school year, AI will likely be in every classroom. Yet, there’s still a disconnect between students and educators about what constitutes acceptable generative AI use and access to technology to support learning. Turnitin is helping to address these challenges by providing educators and administrators with new offerings to adapt to AI’s ever-evolving role in education, and supporting ethical AI use for students.
4. With AI predicted to be in every classroom this school year, how is Turnitin helping educators adapt to its expanding role in education?
With 2024-2025 anticipated to be the year of AI for academia, educators and institutions need new tools and trusted partners to help them navigate this new reality. Two years prior to the public launch of ChatGPT, Turnitin began working on how to provide educators with a tool that gives them transparency into the use of AI writing so they can guide students to use AI responsibly and support academic integrity.
We launched our AI writing detection feature in April 2023 to help educators identify AI-generated content in student work while safeguarding students’ interests. As AI evolves, Turnitin’s products will too. New features can be easily integrated into existing products and workflows for ease of customers’ use and a decreased learning curve. We regularly provide updated student, educator and institutional resources to help them navigate this new technology and sentence-level detection data.
With our newest offerings, Turnitin aims to empower educators to embrace the expanded role of AI in the classroom and adapt to this shifting landscape. In addition to the new Paper to Digital add-on and enhanced Similarity Report, Turnitin recently released our new AI paraphrasing detection feature to help educators identify instances where AI paraphrasing may have been used to modify AI-generated text. The AI paraphrasing detection feature enables educators and researchers to initiate constructive conversations with writers about the importance of ethical writing practices and proper paraphrasing techniques.
5. What resources does Turnitin provide to support ethical AI usage for students?
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. However, before someone can reap the benefits of these tools, they need to understand how to use them responsibly and ethically. The classroom can be part of the solution. It is a safe space for students to learn, practice, take chances, and grow with technology. The classroom and lecture hall can serve as a great training ground for students to understand its ethical boundaries, safely experiment, learn to discern between facts and inaccurate information, and strengthen critical thinking skills.
In addition to our current capabilities, Turnitin is building a new solution for student writing to give both educators and students confidence in the authenticity of work by focusing on “proof of process.” This new solution, which will be integrated into existing Turnitin workflows, summarizes granular data for instructors like: copied and pasted text, typing patterns, total construction time, and draft history.
Coupled with our existing plagiarism and AI checks, our goal with this solution is to give educators confidence and insight without burden, and offer students comfort in knowing their hard work won’t be judged solely by a score.
Over time, this tool will empower students by integrating generative AI prompts directly into their composition space, allowing educators to oversee their students’ use of AI writing tools for research and writing. This will help give students the confidence and skills to experiment and incorporate AI responsibly and ethically, while also preparing them for their future careers. This tool will also provide educators with the information and insight they need to maintain academic standards in the classroom.
6. What are the expected benefits of the new AI-powered tools for educational institutions in fostering fairer assessment environments?
For more than 25 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Our latest offerings were developed with this in mind.
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.
Turnitin’s new Paper to Digital add-on for Feedback Studio helps ensure fairer assessment environments by eliminating grading bias. Paper to Digital uses handwriting recognition and leverages a distinct type of AI to automatically group together similar answers in multi-item instructional instruments. With AI-assisted grouping and horizontal grading by question, Paper to Digital streamlines the evaluation of diverse assignment types. This involves grouping similar answers together across variable-length assignments, like problem sets and projects, or fixed-template assignments, such as worksheets, quizzes, or exams. Instructors are then able to provide feedback to multiple students simultaneously, doing away with tedious grading tasks. And, ultimately, by streamlining grading and strengthening the consistency of instructor feedback, institutions can foster a fairer and more effective assessment environment.
Annie Chechitelli has spent the past two decades innovating with educators to expand access to education, meet the quickly changing needs of learners, and empower students to do their best, original work. As the Chief Product Officer at Turnitin, Annie oversees the Turnitin suite of applications which includes academic integrity, grading and feedback, and assessment capabilities.Prior to joining Turnitin, Annie spent over five years at Amazon where she led Kindle Content for School, Work, and Government and launched the AWS EdTech Growth Advisory team, advising education technology companies on how to grow their product and go-to-market strategies with AWS.Annie began her career in EdTech at Wimba where she launched a live collaboration platform for education which was ultimately acquired by Blackboard in 2010. At Blackboard she led platform management, focused on transitioning Blackboard Learn to the cloud.Annie holds a B.S. from Columbia University and an M.B.A. and M.S. from Claremont Graduate University. She resides near Indianapolis, Indiana with her youngest child and husband, with two children attending college on the East Coast.
