The Easiest Way to Stop AI Plagiarizing

This is the EASIEST way to see if a student used AI to do the entire assignment and didn’t think or create for themselves. Only thing easier is knowing your students’ work and comparing (that’s the best “AI detector”).

The Five-Question Fix: A Better Way to Check if Students Actually Did the Work

We all know AI plagiarism detectors don't work. Universities are moving away from them. Schools across the country are dropping them. The false positive problem alone (flagging real student writing as AI-generated) has made the whole thing more trouble than it's worth.

So what do we do instead?

I've been doing something this year that a lot of teachers are picking up, and it's so simple it almost feels too obvious. Shout out to Mrs. G, a teacher in New York who's been running a version of this too. She saw it first on Twitter/X so if you have that post please share!

Here's what you can do. When students turn in a writing assignment, I take their paper (long, short, doesn't matter) and I send it to Claude or ChatGPT with a simple prompt: Take this paper and create a five-question knowledge comprehension quiz based on the information in it.

Next day, every student gets a quiz. On their own paper. The one they supposedly wrote.

That's it.

Here's why this works

If you actually did the work which means you researched the topic, brainstormed, outlined, drafted, revised etc, then you're going to crush that quiz. You lived in that content. You made choices about what to include and what to leave out. Five comprehension questions on material you genuinely wrote? Easy 5 out of 5.

But if you just copied and pasted something from ChatGPT, slapped your name on it, and hit submit? Good luck getting a 1 out of 5 on that thing. You don't know what's in the paper (or any assignment) because you were never part of the process.

This works no matter what your AI policy is. Whether students can use AI for part of the assignment, all of it, or none of it the short/formative quiz still tells you what you need to know. The quiz rewards being part of the process, not avoiding tools.

Two more options if quizzes aren't your thing

The quiz is the easiest version of this, but it's not the only one. Here are two other ways to get at the same thing.

Have them teach it. Pull a student aside (or do it in front of the whole class if you want) and say, "Teach me the main argument of your paper in two minutes." If they wrote it, they can do this without blinking. They'll riff on it, go off script, answer your follow-ups. If they didn't? You'll see it immediately. The stammering, the vague hand-waving, the "I mean, it's basically about..." without ever getting specific. Teaching requires ownership of the material in a way that copy-pasting never gives you.

Have them defend it. This one's my favorite for older students. Sit down with them one-on-one or in a small group and ask them to defend a claim they made in the paper. Push back a little. Ask why they chose that evidence over something else. Ask what the strongest counterargument would be. A student who was part of the process has opinions about their paper. They'll push back on your pushback. A student who outsourced the whole thing to AI will fold in about 30 seconds because they don't actually have a position…they have a document.

All three of these require you to also know your students. The quiz, the teach, and the defend are doing the same thing. They're creating a moment where understanding is either visible or it isn't. No detector needed. Just a conversation.

Some students will defer to one of the three options, and you’ll know which is best for each kid.

The real shift in my practice

The old question was: Did the student write this?

The better question is: Does the student know this?

It means I’m not playing detective anymore, trying to run papers through some sketchy detector and hoping it gets the call right. It also means I’m not trying to play “I gotcha” games. I’ll let the students know this is going to happen. Better be prepared.

We're just asking did the learning happen? That's what we actually care about.

And there's something kind of perfect about using AI on the teacher's side to make this work. You're not fighting the technology. You're using it to quickly generate targeted comprehension questions so you can spend your time on the stuff that matters like figuring out what your students actually understand and where they need help.

What do you think?

Stop chasing whether AI wrote the paper. Start finding out whether the student can talk about, teach, or defend their thinking and understanding. Five questions. At the start of one class period. No detector required.

The best assessment strategies right now aren't about catching cheaters. They're about designing situations where you can't fake understanding.

What do you think? What are you doing in this moment that is working?