A Grammarly Authorship alternative where the instructor holds the record

Why instructors look past Authorship

Grammarly announced Authorship in October 2024. It is a feature of the Grammarly browser extension and desktop apps that logs what a student typed, pasted or generated with AI while they wrote, and produces a report the student can share with an instructor. It is free, included in Grammarly Free and Pro, and it has spread quickly: Canvas integration in September 2025, Blackboard in August 2026, and more than 5 million Authorship reports by August 2026 according to Grammarly.

Source: grammarly.com/authorship and the Grammarly blog, checked 2026-09-08.

The reason an instructor goes looking for something else is not that Authorship is bad. It is that Authorship is the student’s. Three things follow from that.

• The student must install and enable it. Authorship only sees the browser or app in which Grammarly is running, and only while it is switched on. A student who wrote in a different browser, on a phone, or with the extension off has no report, and there is no way to tell that case from a student who chose not to produce one.
• The report belongs to the student. It is shared at their discretion. An instructor can ask for it and can require it in a syllabus, but the record is generated on the student’s machine, under the student’s account, and reaches the instructor only if the student sends it.
• The log can be laundered. On November 6, 2025, Plagiarism Today published “How Grammarly Launders AI-Generated Content,” documenting that AI-generated text passed through Grammarly’s own rewrite tools reads as typed in an Authorship report. The product that makes the record also offers a way around it.

Source: grammarly.com/authorship; plagiarismtoday.com, November 6, 2025; both checked 2026-09-08.

What Authorship does well

For a student who is worried about a false accusation, Authorship is a sensible thing to turn on. It costs nothing, it works in the tools the student already uses, and it gives them a document to bring to a meeting. Grammarly reports that Rowan-Cabarrus Community College saw integrity violations fall from 27 to 1 in a pilot. That number is vendor-reported, but the direction is plausible, because a student who knows a record exists tends to do the work. The Canvas and Blackboard integrations mean a student can attach a report where they submit. If your goal is to give students a way to defend themselves, Authorship does that, and this site says as much on the page written for students.

Source: Grammarly case study, checked 2026-09-08; vendor-reported.

What an instructor needs that a student-side tool cannot give

An integrity process runs on evidence that exists whether or not the student in question wants it to. That sets the bar for an alternative.

• The record is created by the assignment, not the writer. The instructor sets up the session, every submission carries a record, and a missing record is itself a fact rather than a shrug.
• The record is held on the instructor’s side. It sits in the instructor’s account under a retention window the instructor chose, and it can be exported to a chair or a board without asking the student for it.
• Pasted text stays pasted. A rewrite pass should not turn a paste into typing. The record has to separate what entered by keystroke from what entered in a block, and keep that separation through every later edit.
• Nothing for the student to install or forget. If the record depends on an extension being on, it will be off in the one case that matters.

Side by side

Source: grammarly.com/authorship and plagiarismtoday.com, checked 2026-09-08; EssayGuard pricing at /pricing.

How EssayGuard fits

EssayGuard turns the arrangement around. The instructor creates the assignment, sets a retention window, and shares one link. Students open the link in any browser and write. There is nothing to install and no account to create. While they write, EssayGuard records every keystroke, revision, pause and paste with a server-side timestamp, and takes periodic snapshots of the document that are checked against the event stream. Pasted text stays marked for the rest of the session, through every later edit. When the student submits, the replay is in the instructor’s account, and a printable evidence report can be produced if the paper is questioned. The student can see that the recorder is running and can export their own record, so the transparency Authorship offers a student is still there. The difference is that the instructor does not have to ask for it.

A keystroke-level record shows what a log of typed-versus-pasted cannot. It shows the pause before a hard sentence, the thesis that was rewritten three times, the paragraph moved from the end to the opening, and the order in which the argument formed. That is what a person writing looks like, and it is hard to counterfeit, because a script that emits keystrokes does not produce the snapshots that writing produces. When the event stream and the snapshots disagree, the session reads as unrecorded rather than as writing.

The record has limits, and the evidence report states them. It shows how text entered the editor. It does not show whether the ideas were the student’s, whether a draft was dictated from notes written elsewhere, or what happened in another window. EssayGuard does no stylistic analysis and issues no verdict. It is evidence for a conversation, not a finding.

Pricing is public. The rest of this semester is free for every course you teach with unlimited students, once per teacher. The Educator plan is $99 per year, Department starts at $495 per year for up to eight instructors, and Campus starts at $2,950 per year. The DPA is published at /dpa, and the security page says what is and is not kept.

Who should still use Authorship

Students should, and instructors should be glad when a student turns up with an Authorship report. It costs the student nothing and it gives them something to say. A campus that already licenses Grammarly and has the Canvas or Blackboard integration in place has a free way for students to document their own process, and a policy that puts that responsibility on the student is a reasonable policy. EssayGuard is for the instructor who needs the record to exist for the whole class, on their own side of the desk, without depending on what each student installed. The two are not in conflict. One is the student’s defense; the other is the instructor’s record.