Ask for a record, not a detector score

A student writes the assignment on iwrote, in the browser, and the page records how the essay was written as they write it. When they are done, they certify it and hand you a short link with the essay. The link opens a certificate: how long the piece took, how much was typed, how much arrived at once, where the pauses and the rewriting fell, and whether it carries the mark, Written by a human.

It is not an AI detector. Nothing on the certificate is a guess from the student’s sentences, and the model that reads a session is sent the counts and timings, never the words.

1. Tell students to write the assignment on iwrote.co from the first word. There is nothing to install and nothing for you to set up, and a student needs no account to start writing.
2. Send them the page for students. It says which boxes to untick for a piece meant for one teacher, and to download the writing history after certifying.
3. Ask for the link with the essay, and for the writing-history file if you mean to check it. Certifying needs a login, and students must be 13 or older.

Reading a certificate takes nothing but the link. Checking it, rather than taking its word, takes the writing-history file: drop it on the certificate page, and three checks run in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere:

• –The file is the one the certificate names.
• –It replays, edit by edit, to exactly the text of the certificate.
• –Every figure printed on the certificate comes out of it again.

The link itself is signed with a key whose public half is published, and dated by a timestamping service iwrote does not run. A school’s own systems can check both from code, without an account.

It is evidence about one writing session, not proof of authorship. It shows how the text arrived, not where the ideas came from: a student who planned an argument with a friend, a tutor or a model and then typed it out in their own words looks, to a record, like a student who typed. A quotation pasted in to cite shows as pasted, and the rest is still theirs.

The counts are taken in the student’s browser, and a page in a browser can be interfered with; every certificate says so on its face. What a certificate cannot prove is written down in full. Weigh a certificate with everything else you know about the student’s work.

Most writing is done without iwrote, by people who wrote every word, so a student with no certificate is not a suspect. If you ask for one, ask it of the whole class, and give a student who cannot use it another way to show their work.

Some students will have reason not to. Writing by dictation, with an input method for a language like Japanese or Chinese, or in a second language has not been tested, and may read differently from how it happened. A student who writes that way should not be held to what a certificate says about them.

If a student is already under suspicion for a piece written elsewhere, a certificate cannot help with it. Accused of using AI and why detectors flag human writing are written for that, and checking student writing without a detector is written for you.

A student’s piece lives in their own browser until they save a copy to iwrote. The privacy page says what iwrote reads and keeps, and what it refuses to touch. iwrote is free while it is in the open, and the terms say what that means.

Using it with a class, or want a feature for one? Write to arpan@iwrote.co.