Montana State University currently employs the Turnitin AI detection tool. Within the similarity report that analyzes a student’s written work for plagiarism, it now also shows an overall percentage of the document that AI writing tools, such as ChatGPT, may have generated. If you wish to use the AI detection tool, please follow these steps to enable Turnitin for your D2L/Brightspace assignments. Additionally, inform your students both through language in your syllabus and when discussing assignments in-class that you will be enabling this feature and they should refer to your acceptable use policies to avoid any academic misconduct. 

Example of TurnItIn AI detection output

Example of a Turnitin report shown above.

While Turnitin claims a 98% accuracy rate in detecting the use of AI, the company has not published any research to support these claims and there have been cases where AI detection tools have produced false positives. As with cases where plagiarism is suspected, it is recommended that the AI detection report from Turnitin be used as flag for potential academic misconduct, instead of sole evidence, for further investigation into the student’s use of AI and their intentions behind using it. Using the report as a starting point for the conversation, faculty can ask the student questions to explain the choices they made during the process for writing the paper in question such as why they structured it that way, why they used certain pieces of evidence to support their positions, and a list of sources they used for the paper. Look for irregularities in the work such as topics that were not covered in class.  

Some courses of action after having this conversation with students include having students redo the assignment or 0 points awarded for this assignment depending to the degree to which AI was used. 

If after having this conversation with a student, you believe that the student engaged in academic misconduct, please follow the Office of the Dean of Students process for reporting academic misconduct.