How it works
A record builds itself while the class writes.
Setting up an assignment takes minutes. After that the work happens on its own, and you only open a session if you have a reason to.
Ostrom's fieldwork in the Swiss alpine commons did not refute Hardin so much as change the question he was asking. Where he saw an inevitability, she saw an absence of the institutions her villagers had spent four centuries building. The distinction matters because policy written from the first premise reaches for the state or the market, and policy written from the second reaches for the people who are already there. Collective action problems are rarely solved by ownership alone, but by rules that the people bound by them have a hand in making, monitoring and revising.
A simulated session, not a real student.
The sequence
Four steps, in the order they happen.
You create the assignment
Title, prompt, due date, and the retention window you want for this piece of work. Thirty days, ninety, or a full year.
EssayGuard gives you a class code and a join link. That link is the only thing your students ever need.
Students write on the link
They open the link, enter their name, and write. There is no account to create, no extension to install, and no new password to lose in week three. It works inside a Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle frame, so students never leave the course shell.
If your class already drafts in Google Docs, the EssayGuard extension records the document your assignment points at, and only that document.
The session records itself
EssayGuard keeps how the document was built: typing rhythm, revisions, deletions, pauses, and pastes. It does not read the prose for style, and it never leaves the document.
Students can see that the recorder is running and what it keeps. That transparency is deliberate. A record only helps a student if they know it exists.
You read the record, if you need to
Most sessions are never opened, and that is the point. When a paper does raise a question, you scrub the session like a video and watch the draft come together.
If it has to leave your office, print the evidence report. It carries the timeline, the revision count, every paste with its length, and the plain language caveats that keep an honest reader honest.
What comes out
An evidence report of exactly how the assignment was written.
The evidence report is the paid hinge of the product, and it is built for a reader who has no reason to trust you: a chair, an integrity board, a dean, a parent. It states what was recorded, what that does and does not establish, and leaves the finding to a person.
In the report
- Total writing time and the sittings it was spread across
- Revision count, with the heaviest editing located
- Every paste, its length, and where it landed
- The full timeline, attached
- A plain statement of what the record cannot tell you
Questions
The ones faculty ask first.
Does a student have to install anything?
Not for the web editor. They open the join link and write. The Chrome extension is only needed if your class drafts in Google Docs, and in that case it watches the assignment document and nothing else.
Does it work inside our LMS?
EssayGuard works in any browser that is connected to the internet, so it runs wherever your class already writes.
What about speech to text?
EssayGuard detects Apple and Google native speech to text and identifies it clearly. It also identifies AI voice to text and flags that separately. If you do not want AI used in an assignment, we strongly suggest making it clear to students that AI voice to text is not allowed either.
What happens to the sessions afterward?
You choose the retention window when you create the assignment, and deletion at the end of that window is a commitment we make in the data processing agreement. The security page has the detail.
Try it on your own class
The rest of this semester is free.
Every course you teach, unlimited students, 90 days of history.