Process tracking vs. comparing a student to their own writing
There are two broad ways to check student writing without relying on AI detectors. One watches how a document gets written. The other checks whether the finished writing sounds like the student. They answer different questions, and they fail in different places.
Process tracking: how was this written?
Google Docs version history, Draftback, Grammarly Authorship, and locked writing surfaces like Writers Lock record or replay the writing process: typing, pasting, deleting, timing.
Strong when:
- A student pastes in a large block of text
- You want to see drafting and revision as a learning artifact
- All writing happens inside the tracked tool
Weak when:
- A student retypes AI-generated text by hand
- Writing happens on a phone, at home, or in another app
- Students use a personal account or a different document
- You need a decision about work that's already been turned in
Voice comparison: does this sound like the student?
Comparing a submission to the student's own earlier writing looks at the finished text itself: how sentences are built, how often small function words appear, punctuation habits, vocabulary range. These habits are steady within a writer and hard to change on purpose.
Strong when:
- The writing happened somewhere you can't see
- The text was retyped rather than pasted
- You have trusted samples of the student's writing, especially from class
Weak when:
- You have very little of the student's writing to compare against
- The piece is very short
- AI was used lightly, to polish a few sentences of a real draft
Using both
They're complementary. Process tracking is good evidence about how a document was produced inside the tool. Voice comparison is good evidence about whether the result fits the writer. A teacher with both, plus a conversation, is in a much stronger position than one relying on any single signal.
Where Authentext fits
Authentext is a voice-comparison tool. It builds a Voice Profile for each student from writing you trust and compares new submissions against it. It reads finished work from Google Classroom, installs nothing on student devices, and doesn't track keystrokes. If your school already uses a process tracker, Authentext can help with the cases it can't see.
Keep reading
Try Authentext during the beta
Authentext is free during the beta. It compares each student's writing to their own history, not to AI models. Beta educators get 50% off whatever the price turns out to be.