How it works
A record builds itself while the class writes.
Setting up an assignment takes about three minutes. After that the record builds on its own, and every essay comes back marked so you know which ones to open.
Ostrom's fieldwork in the Swiss alpine commons did not refute Hardin so much as change the question he was asking. 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. 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.
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 rules for this piece of work, such as whether quotations may be pasted in.
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, sign in with their school account or an email, and write. Nothing to install.
Post the link in Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle. It opens in its own tab, so students stay signed in.
The session records itself
EssayGuard keeps how the document was built: typing rhythm, revisions, deletions, pauses, pastes, and when the student left the page and came back. It never sees what they did elsewhere.
Students are told before they start that EssayGuard records how they write. That is deliberate. A record only helps a student if they know it exists.
You read the record, if you need to
Each essay comes back marked Approved, Needs Review or Flagged, with a short summary of what the recording shows. Most come back Approved and need nothing from you. 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 summary, the timeline, 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 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 and what that does and does not establish. Any decision about a student is made by a person.
In the report
- The status and a plain summary: what we saw, what it usually means, how to find out
- Writing time and the sittings it was spread across
- Every paste, its length, and where it landed
- A comparison with the student's own earlier essays
- The typing checks, and how complete the recording is
- A plain statement of what the record cannot tell you
Questions
The ones faculty ask first.
Does a student have to install anything?
No. They open the join link, sign in, and write in the browser.
Does it work inside our LMS?
Post the join link in Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle. It opens in its own tab, so students stay signed in while they write.
What about speech to text?
Speech to text built into Apple, Google and Windows devices shows up as dictated, in blue. AI dictation tools paste their text in, so they show up as pastes. If AI is off limits for an assignment, tell students that includes AI dictation.
What happens to the sessions afterward?
Records are kept for 90 days by default, and your school can ask us to delete them at any time. The security page and the data processing agreement have 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.