Turnitin & Proctorio: How Online Tools are Shaping Academic Integrity Regulation

By Anoushka D'sa

In recent times, teachers and educators have more & more turned to online tools such as Turnitin, Proctorio, & Grammarly to aid students in learning effectively, as well as regulating the usage of AI and avoiding plagiarism.

Turnitin, the online tool used by teachers, schools, and universities around the world, is known for being a hub for teachers & external organizations to grade & assess pieces of work. Turnitin’s Feedback Studio enables teachers to easily compare submissions within a cohort, making grading & providing feedback much simpler and streamlined, whilst also enabling easier detection of plagiarism, with Similarity Report, which identifies similar/unoriginal bodies of text in students’ work.

Another tool utilized by Turnitin is its new AI Writing Detector, launched in 2023, under the name Originality, the tool monitors pieces of work for signs of academic misconduct (e.g. AI usage, AI paraphrasing, etc), and enables teachers & schools to easily detect and receive statistics on this.

However, there have been many inconsistencies with Turnitin’s AI Detector, with candidates reporting their essays & exhibitions being incorrectly flagged for AI-written content. Even Turnitin itself claims “false positives are a possibility in AI models”. For many reasons, including unfair persecution by examination boards, inaccuracies in AI detectors, especially ones used by examination organizations like the IB, can be extremely problematic for students & universities combined.

Turnitin has recently acted on these issues, with a new improvement to its AI Detection technology. The launch of their AI Writing Detection Model 2 (AIW-2) & AI Rewriting Detection Model (AIR-1) technologies follows high levels of testing these models against AI models like GPT- 4, Llama - 2, & Gemini Pro 1.0.

The tests have proved a lower false positive rate, signaling a potential increase in the quality of AI Writing Detection in academic settings. These improvements enable students to demonstrate high levels of academic integrity.

Fig. 1 Turnitin AI Illustration

Another form of an online integrity tool, Proctorio, pushes students to complete online examinations & tests in an academically honest manner, using remote proctoring systems to track any unusual/suspicious activity when a candidate is taking an examination. Proctorio was used heavily during the COVID-19 lockdown, when many examinations had to be taken online, and academic dishonesty was at its peak. Its video & audio recordings utilize eye-tracking, behavior monitoring, and web browser tab tracking.

For obvious reasons, there are many data privacy & storage concerns, including the extent of accessibility of these recordings to external databases & servers. However, Proctorio maintains it “takes data security very seriously”, and that its recordings are stored with Zero-Knowledge Encryption, meaning only institution-approved representatives can access these recordings for academic purposes. The recordings are also stored in the Proctorio database for a minimum of 7 days unless external examination boards request these recordings for verification purposes. This data is also stored under three layers of encryption and in databases that undergo daily penetration and susceptibility tests to ensure high levels of data security.

Recently, in December 2024, Proctorio announced that when the hardware that enables or interferes with the quality of the audiovisual recordings(such as Webcams, audio transmitters, etc) is removed or added from the device, an Incident Log flag will be sent to the examination board, with specific data on the hardware type & model, allowing the boards to determine the severity of the incident.

Fig. 2. Proctorio Data Privacy Screen

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