Reviewing student work
A submission has landed on your desk that does not read like the person who handed it in. This is the workflow, end to end, and it takes about five minutes a piece.
If you want the wider framing first — what the tool is for, and where it should not be used — that is at Educator quick-start.
Setting up once
Create an account with a Google sign-in, use your institutional address if you have one, and pick Teacher as your role. That last part matters more than it looks, because the role sets the detection threshold, and the teacher threshold is the stricter one.
The first 1,000 words are free and no card is asked for, which is enough to run one short submission and see the shape of the thing before deciding whether it fits how you work.
Step one — paste the submission
Copy the text out of wherever it arrived, whether that is Blackboard or Canvas or Google Classroom or an attachment somebody emailed you at half past eleven, and paste it into the panel.
Strip the title page and any submission metadata first. The engine reads style consistency across the whole document, and a cover sheet is written in a different register from an essay, so leaving it in muddies the reading.
Step two — press Analyse
There is nothing to configure. Two frontier models read the submission and argue over it passage by passage, and a third settles anything they cannot agree on between them.
It wants around 250 words to work with. Below that there is not enough on the page for two reviewers to genuinely disagree about, so a very short answer is turned away rather than guessed at, which we would rather do than hand you a confident reading of four sentences.
Step three — read the grey passages
Grey means both reviewers found the passage reads as machine-written, and each grey mark carries the reasoning that got it there, so click into them rather than counting them.
Three patterns are worth more than the rest. Look for long unbroken runs, where a whole paragraph is marked rather than a sentence here and there. Look for grey sitting between gold, which is the patchwork shape and usually the most informative thing on the page. And look at the conclusion, because conclusions are where machine writing is at its most predictable and a marked final paragraph on an otherwise clean essay is a common and quite specific pattern.
Make notes as you go on anything you would want to ask about.
Step four — read the gold passages too
Gold marks passages that read as genuinely written by a person, and skipping past them wastes the most useful thing in the report.
They give you somewhere to start the conversation that is not an accusation, and they give a student who did write the essay something concrete to point at. They also tell you what that student sounds like, which is what makes the grey passages next to them legible as a shift rather than just as a flag.
An essay with almost no gold anywhere is worth noticing on its own. It does not prove anything, and it does mean the writing has very little of a person in it, which is true of lightly-edited machine output and also true of a draft that has been polished flat by an anxious student.
Step five — keep a record if you need one
The toolbar above the editor has a Download, which gives you a dated A4 PDF carrying the word count and every marked passage with its reasoning. It is built for an integrity file or a meeting.
Do check your institution's policy on what may be cited in a formal process before you rely on it, because that varies a great deal between institutions and some have a settled position already.
Talking to the student
Frame it as a question about process rather than a charge, because that is both fairer and considerably more likely to get you an honest answer.
Open with what is clearly theirs. "The section on X is obviously your own work and it is the strongest part of the essay." Then ask about the rest in the same tone: "This paragraph reads quite differently from the rest of it — can you talk me through how you wrote it?" Ask directly whether they used any AI tools while drafting, for outlining or editing or anything else, since a lot of students will simply say yes when asked plainly and were not clear on where the line sat.
And offer the revision. Someone who used a model for a section and rewrites it in their own words has learned the thing the assignment was for, which is a better outcome than a penalty for nearly everybody involved.
There is no villain in this conversation. The student is not one, and neither are you.
What it costs
The free tier is 1,000 words with no card, which covers one short submission.
The Educator plan is £13.20 a month, tax included, with prices set in your own currency at the point you subscribe and fixed there afterwards. It carries a monthly allowance of 1,300 CVT, which is roughly 97,500 words, or somewhere around thirty typical submissions. Go past the allowance and the excess is metered and settled at month end up to a fair-usage cap, so a heavy marking week does not stop you mid-essay. Cancel whenever you like and the plan runs to the end of the month you have already paid for.
One-time credit packs are not sold to individual accounts. They are for organisations of three or more people, which is covered at Schools, agencies and societies.
Questions we get asked
How accurate is it?
No detector is reliable enough to decide anything on its own, and we do not publish an accuracy figure, because everybody's published figure comes from a benchmark they chose themselves. Treat it as one input in a review you are leading.
Can I use the result as evidence?
It can support an investigation. Whether it can be cited formally depends on your institution, and the PDF helps, though the student's own account of their process and their previous submissions are usually the stronger material.
The student says they did not use AI and the essay is heavily marked. Now what?
Ask about process. Someone who wrote an essay can generally reconstruct how they built the argument, which sources surprised them, and what they cut. Someone who did not tends to answer in generalities. And keep the possibility open that the tool is wrong, because it sometimes is.
Can I check a draft rather than a finished piece?
You can, and it will be less reliable. Style consistency needs a whole document to calibrate against.
Can I recommend it to students?
Please do. Students checking their own drafts before submission is the use we would most like to see, and it is the same tool at the same address with the first 1,000 words free.