Study support provider Studiosity has announced it will purchase Norwegian ed-tech provider, Norvalid, promising a “new approach to academic integrity.”
Norvalid seeks to switch the emphasis from identification of dishonesty in assignments to confirmation of creation, using four assessments of written work, comparing them to an on-file sample assignment by the student.
The tech puts students through the hoops through:
- Linguistic analysis: compares the linguistic “finger-print” in the text being marked to the author’s writing on-file and assesses whether it is likely genuine.
- Perplexity analysis: runs a statistical analysis to assess if the text was written by a human, our writing being “naturally more ‘chaotic’ than AI-generated text”. Combined with linguistic analysis this also tests for contract cheating, indicating it is written by a person, just not the purported author
- Free-text questions: immediately after submitting, the student is asked open-ended questions about content
- Closed questions: at submission students are asked to add words deleted from sentences in their assignment. This is a measure of writing style, not memory.
Norvalid states more tests are in development and adds the technology is, “not a final verdict.”
“Instructors remain in control, using the score and supporting insights to validate
submissions, start conversations, and tailor their responses to the learning context,” Norvalid states.
“This approach moves us beyond punishment and surveillance. It opens the door to trust-based, formative evaluation,” is the pitch.
The prospect of a successful standard product to identify AI-based student cheating is a major opportunity for Studiosity, offering the prospect of protecting the credibility of its student assessments.
Plus, a proprietary product could appeal to present and potential university clients. In September, regulator TEQSA released a comprehensive set of academic integrity strategies for “the time of AI.” Studiosity might now have a way less cumbersome support to sell.