UnTXT and the University of Cambridge's AI Policy - What Students Need to Know
Summary: Cambridge's rule is about content generated by AI going into your work unacknowledged. UnTXT generates nothing, but the policy does not mention checking tools either way, your assessment brief can override it, and our advice is to say you used it.
What Cambridge's AI Policy Actually Says
Cambridge's rule is one sentence, and it is worth having in front of you rather than paraphrased:
"A student using any unacknowledged content generated by artificial intelligence within a summative assessment as though it is their own work constitutes academic misconduct, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the assessment brief."
Two words carry the weight. Generated, and unacknowledged.
UnTXT generates nothing. It reads a draft you have already written and marks the passages carrying the statistical patterns of machine-written text. No text is produced, none is suggested, and nothing is altered. There is no generated content to acknowledge, because none was made.
What the policy does not do is mention checking tools at all — not to permit them, not to exclude them. We are telling you that rather than reading a permission into a silence. The rule is written about material that comes out of an AI and ends up in your work, which is a different object from a tool that reads what you wrote and hands it back unchanged.
Note also the tail of that sentence: your assessment brief can override it, in either direction. Cambridge is a collection of faculties that do not agree with each other about this, and several publish their own line. Classics, English, and History and Philosophy of Science have all issued separate guidance, and HPS is stricter than the University's baseline.
So read your brief and your faculty's page. They are the ones that bind you.
What we would do. Say you used it. One line — "I used UnTXT, an AI pattern checker, to check my own draft before submission" — costs a sentence and removes the word unacknowledged from the conversation permanently. That word is doing most of the work in Cambridge's rule, and it is the cheapest one to disarm.
Source: Artificial Intelligence (AI) — Education Quality and Policy Office, University of Cambridge, checked 11 October 2026. Your faculty's guidance sits alongside it. Where Cambridge's pages and this one disagree, theirs is the one that counts.
Where the rule that binds you lives
The university-wide page is rarely the whole answer. Check, in this order: your assessment brief, then your module or course handbook, and if neither says, ask whoever set the work. If it matters, get the answer in writing.
Using UnTXT on Cambridge work
- Finish the draft first. Run it on something complete. A half-written argument reads as disjointed to any checker, ours included.
- Paste it in and press Analyse. Two AI models read it separately and argue over each passage, and a third settles what they cannot agree on.
- Read the reasons on the grey passages. Grey means the passage follows the patterns machine writing leans on. Formal academic prose earns that honestly, so read the reason before you change anything.
- Leave the gold alone. Those passages already sound like you.
- Change what you decide to change, in your own words. Nothing on the page will write it for you.
- Say you used it, if your course asks which tools you used, and arguably even if it does not.
What the marks do and do not mean
A mark is not a verdict, and it is not evidence of how you wrote something. Grey says a passage reads a certain way. It cannot say who wrote it, and nobody at Cambridge should be told otherwise on the strength of it, by you or by anybody else.
There is no percentage, because a number invites people to treat a reading as a ruling.
Questions
What does it cost?
The first 1,000 words are free, with no card. That covers an extract more often than a whole essay. Checking whole pieces means a monthly plan, from £8.40 including tax.
Can I check a dissertation in sections?
Yes. Every check is saved to your Documents under its own title, so you can go a chapter at a time.
My work has been questioned. What now?
Bring your process: drafts, notes, the sources that surprised you. That settles the question better than any tool's output does. There is a longer piece at If you have been accused.