For faculty
AI-resistant writing assignments that still let students write at home
Every move that makes an assignment harder to outsource costs something. This page prices them honestly and explains the one that keeps take-home writing.
In short
No writing assignment is AI-proof. In-class writing, oral defenses, local prompts, staged drafts and reflections each make generated text harder to submit, at a cost in class time, grading time or the assignment itself. Writing on the record, in an editor that keeps how the draft was built, keeps take-home writing and gives the instructor evidence of the process rather than a guess about the product.
Why AI-proof is the wrong target
The scale of the problem is not in dispute. Turnitin reported in February 2026 that 15 percent of submissions between October 2025 and February 2026 were more than 80 percent AI-written, against 3 percent when its detector launched in 2023. But no assignment design makes generated text impossible to submit. Every design makes it more expensive, and the honest question is how much each design costs you and your students in return.
Source: Turnitin press materials, February 24, 2026, checked 2026-09-08.
The moves below are the standard ones, and each has a real place. The problem is that most of them buy resistance by taking something away from the assignment: the time to draft, the chance to revise, the length, or the fact that the writing happens at home at all. The last section covers the one that does not.
The standard moves and what they cost
In-class writing
The student writes in the room, on paper or on a locked device, in a fixed period. It prevents generated text almost completely for that piece. The cost is the piece itself: a fifty-minute essay is a different genre from a two-week essay, with no research, no revision and no time to find out what the argument is. It also spends class time that was teaching something, and it disadvantages students who write slowly or need accommodations that a timed room does not offer.
Oral defense
The student submits the essay and then talks about it for five to ten minutes: what the argument is, why this source, what they cut. A student who did not write the paper usually cannot defend it, and the conversation itself is good teaching. The cost is time. Ten minutes each for a section of thirty is five hours per assignment, and it does not scale past one or two assignments a term. It is also the hardest move to run fairly for students who are anxious, multilingual, or simply quiet.
Local and personal prompts
Ask about this week’s lecture, a text only the class has read, a local event, or the student’s own experience. Generic models answer generic prompts well and specific prompts less well. The cost is that specificity decays: a student can paste the lecture notes into the prompt, and a personal prompt can be answered with an invented person. It also narrows what you can ask. Some courses need the student to write about Kant, and Kant is not local.
Staged drafts
Require a proposal, an annotated bibliography, an outline, a first draft and a revision, each submitted separately. Generating five consistent artifacts is more work than generating one, and the stages are pedagogically sound on their own. The cost is grading load, which roughly multiplies by the number of stages, and the fact that a student can generate each stage in turn from the previous one. The stages show that documents existed at intervals, not how any of them was written.
Reflection
Add a paragraph in which the student describes their process: what they changed, what was hard, what they would do differently. It is cheap to assign and useful to read. It prevents very little, because a reflection is also text and can be generated with the essay. It works as a companion to a process record, where the reflection can be read against what the record shows, and poorly on its own.
Writing on the record
The last option keeps the assignment exactly as it was: a take-home essay, written over days, researched and revised, at whatever length the course needs. What changes is where the writing happens. The student composes in a recorded editor, and the record of the session comes in with the essay.
A keystroke-level record shows what a document history cannot: typed text against pasted text, with each paste marked and measured; the pauses where the writer stopped to think; the sentences deleted and rebuilt; and the order in which the argument formed. Generated text has no such record. It arrives in a paste, or it is retyped in a rhythm that does not look like composing, and either way the record shows a document that was transcribed rather than written. The instructor does not need a detector to see it, and no prose is scored.
The cost to the instructor is small and front-loaded: an assignment to create, a link to share, and a paragraph in the syllabus. The cost to the student is that they write in a browser editor rather than in their own word processor, and that they know a record exists. In EssayGuard there is nothing to install, no camera, no monitoring of other tabs, and the student can view and export their own session. The syllabus language page covers how to state that plainly.
There is a version of this move that costs less and delivers less: a Google Docs revision history, read through a replay extension. It shows that a document changed over time, but it does not separate typed from pasted text, the student can turn it off, and auto-typer tools exist whose purpose is to replay pasted text as keystrokes into Docs or Word so the history looks written. A record with server-side timestamps and snapshot cross-checks does not accept that stream as writing; it reads it as unrecorded. The page on faked writing histories covers the difference.
Source: learn.microsoft.com Q&A on Word version history; phrasly.ai/human-auto-typer; r/Professors, May 2026; checked 2026-09-08.
The approaches side by side
| Approach | Cost to the instructor | Cost to the assignment | What it actually prevents |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-class writing | Class time; proctoring | No research, revision or length | Generated text for that piece, nearly all of it |
| Oral defense | Five to ten minutes per student per assignment | None to the writing; heavy on anxious students | Submitting text the student cannot explain |
| Local and personal prompts | Rewriting prompts every term | Narrows what can be asked | Generic generation; not prompting with your own materials |
| Staged drafts | Grading multiplies by stages | None; often improves it | One-shot generation; not staged generation |
| Reflection | One more paragraph to read | None | Very little on its own |
| Docs history replay | Edit access to every document; reading time | Docs only | Careless pasting; not auto-typed text |
| Writing on the record | Assignment setup and a syllabus paragraph | Student writes in a browser editor | Pasted and transcribed text going unnoticed |
Combining them
The approaches are not exclusive, and the strongest designs pair a process record with one cheap second signal. Writing on the record plus a reflection lets you read the student’s account against the session. Writing on the record plus a short oral check, reserved for papers where the record raises a question, keeps the defense cost to a handful of students rather than the whole section. Staged drafts written on the record show not only that the stages existed but how each was built. Whatever the pair, hold to the rule that no penalty rests on a single signal.
Limits
A record shows how text entered the editor. It does not show whether the ideas were the student’s, whether the outline came from a friend, or whether a careful student transcribed generated text slowly enough to look like drafting. It is evidence for a conversation, not a verdict, and the conversation is still the instructor’s job. What the record does is change what that conversation is made of: instead of an impression about the prose and a percentage nobody can defend, both people are looking at the same replay.
Questions people ask
Is any writing assignment actually AI-proof?
No. A student can dictate generated text into a recorded editor, memorize it for an in-class exam, or rehearse an oral defense. Each approach raises the cost of the shortcut until doing the work is the easier path for most students. That is the realistic goal, and it is enough.
Should I just move all writing in class?
Only if the course can afford it. In-class writing removes the shortcut but also removes drafting time, research, revision and the length of piece that many courses exist to teach. It works for short responses and exams. It is a poor fit for the research essay.
Do AI detectors count as an approach?
They are an approach to the finished product, not to the assignment, and the false-positive research is why this page leaves them out. The Stanford study by Liang and colleagues (Patterns, 2023) found detectors flagged 61.3 percent of TOEFL essays by non-native English writers as AI-generated. A tool with that record cannot carry an accusation.
How is writing on the record different from a Google Docs history?
A Docs history records document states and cannot tell typed text from pasted text. It can also be fabricated with auto-typer tools. A keystroke-level record with server timestamps keeps the typing rhythm, pauses, deletions and pastes, and cross-checks the stream against snapshots, so a fabricated session reads as unrecorded rather than as writing.
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