Introducing Pangram’s Writing Playback Feature

When an educator checks a piece of text for AI, often the true goal is not directly to look for AI.

Rather, their true goal is to deduce whether or not a student put their own thought, ideas, and effort into the production of that piece of text. Plagiarism Detection, AI Detection, and more are useful proxies for this goal. But have you ever wished that there was a way to better understand how students write?

The Problem

The problem here is that AI detectors and Plagiarism detectors do not have direct insights into the effort a student puts into a piece of writing. When Pangram marks a piece of writing as fully AI, it’s easy to understand that a student didn’t put much effort into it. But when Pangram marks a piece of text as mixed, how can you tell what to do?

Additionally, these detectors only have access to the final product. They use helpful signals in the final submitted text to flag academic misconduct, but have no visibility into the stages of how that text was produced.

Today, we’re taking a step towards changing that. At Pangram, we’re launching a Google Docs Playback feature.

The Solution

Currently, Pangram has a helpful Google Chrome extension that lets you scan for AI text across the internet with just two clicks. It enables you to select a piece of text, right click, and Check for AI!

Chrome Extension

However, if you open a Google Doc with the Pangram extension, starting today you have access to two new buttons. First, there’s a button next to the Pangram Logo called “Scan For AI”. This will allow you to scan the entire document with a single click. Next to it, you can click a button called “View History”. This is our new Playback Feature.

Pangram in Google Docs

How It Works

If you click this button, this popup will appear. It’s the summary, and at a glance, you can check if any large pastes appear in the production of the document. If you click expand, you will be able to view the timeline of how the paper expanded.

Playback Preview

In this screen, you’ll see a canvas where you can watch the essay evolve, as it was written by the student. You can speed up or down the timeline to watch the process as a time lapse. And on the right, you can see large portions of text that appeared at once, indicating it was pasted from an external source. This could be a source that a student is using, or could be indicative of plagiarism or AI use. Luckily, Pangram can help investigate further!

Full Playback

Why It Matters

Another benefit of this tool is that educators can use it beyond academic integrity violations. By watching the evolution of how students write a particular text, you can gain insights into their writing process. Of course, a piece of text with large numbers of copy-and-pastes into the document (outside of cited sources) would be problematic. But there may be other useful feedback you can give students. For example, if you notice that a particular student writes their essay straightforwardly without any editing, you might advise them to reread what they’ve written more often and try to find places they may be able to improve their writing. On the other side, if you notice a student jumps around a lot or writes and deletes a lot of content, you may advise them to try to complete a draft before returning to edit their work.

Each teacher, student, and classroom is different, so we hope to give you the ability to access the replay and make your own decisions about how to help the student. This is yet another tool that could enable teachers to give better feedback on a students’ writing process and help them improve not only the final product, but how they got there.