Note: The following tip was shared as part of a 2/18/25 Faculty Development Center workshop, "Encouraging Academic Integrity in the Era of AI." Please feel free to adapt and make it your own.

Given faculty concerns about AI-assisted or even wholly-authored student papers, faculty could use a simple feature in any Google document, spreadsheet or presentation slide: its version history, which includes a summary or detailed date & time stamp of every addition or edit. As such, the goal is not to detect the presence of AI in student writing, which is currently very difficult due to “false positives,” but more so to detect the absence of originality.

Why & How This Might Work

Unlike the iterative, word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence approach of most original writing, students who use AI or plagiarized material are likely copying & pasting entirely ‘in-tact” content as “whole cloth” blocks, perhaps with minimal or even no changes before submitting as a final draft. If so, requiring students to submit a Google Doc for their paper will contain a version history that faculty can inspect. If version 1 – or any version – contains large blocks of text in a short period of time, one can reasonably assume the work is not original. More importantly, if students know that faculty know there’s a version history that can be inspected – and questioned about – maybe they will think twice.

Issues & Opportunities

• A student could just try to emulate iterative authorship, copying one word or sentence at a time -- but likely not in a hurry before a deadline, which is the use case most common to plagiarism. Still, the attempt would result in an ironic, self-inflicted penalty, by forcing the student to take time to cheat to appear not to have done so.
  

• Some students may complain that being required to use a Google Doc inhibits their creative writing process or doesn’t show “offline” musings written by hand or in other editors, including notes made on their mobile devices. However, faculty could say the Google Doc version history allows them to to extend the conditions for how students are assessed over time on any assignment vs at the same time (e.g., answering an essay question on an exam). Also, all Google Docs have mobile apps.
  

• For faculty who are ok with students using AI – as an aid to counter writer’s bloc or if clearly cited in the final version – a version history could be a “teachable moment” for how, where and when to do so. Students could be asked to “name” their versions as AI or “mine” or add a comment to explain where and why they changed any AI output.

Suggested Approach

• Create a Google Doc template you ask students to copy and use for their written assignment. You could even make this a Google Assignment for submission in a Learning Management System (LMS) like Blackboard.
  

• Tell students you’ll only accept their assignment if you are a named editor/collaborator (you need editing privileges to view a Google Doc’s version history).
  

• Tell students you reserve the right to randomly inspect the version history of any Google Doc they submit as their own work. You can also require an oral interview to have students explain any version.
  

• FYI: A sample syllabus statement on use of AI by students is below (source: John Fritz, DoIT):

As part of UMBC’s data warehouse migration to HelioCampus, the Data Management Committee’s “Training & Outreach” working group has published a brief (8 min) video orientation on why and how to explore analytics @ UMBC. 

Developed, in part, as a response to the 2006 Middle States Self Study, UMBC’s Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse was designed to help collect, integrate, report on, analyze and (importantly) act on data from a variety of campus systems such as Blackboard, PeopleSoft, and myUMBC. Not surprisingly, the current 2025-26 Middle States Self Study and UMBC 3.0 Strategic Planning initiative will also focus on continuous improvement through curated, campus-wide data to inform decision making.

In addition to the migration to HelioCampus, which constitutes REX 2.0, the orientation video also describes:

• New and (likely) soon-to-be-required training on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to access campus systems like PeopleSoft and REX itself.

• How to find and use free training videos about Tableau’s “viewer” role, which will be used to access predefined (“canned”) reports largely migrated from REX 1.0 that used Microsoft Reporting Services (RS) reports.

• A new “Analytics @ UMBC” Blackboard community where anyone can learn more about REX, “actionable intelligence,” and (eventually) even do some hands-on, self-paced data analysis with dummy data and AI.

• How to get involved with UMBC’s analytics community of practice, including the REX developers’ and users’ groups.

Blackboard course shells for Summer 2025 were created on April 24, 2025.

All Summer 2025 courses listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), regardless of designation as lecture, lab, etc, or instructor assignment, now have a Blackboard presence. RT requests are no longer needed for research, independent study, or practicum courses. As new course sections are added to the SOC by Department Scheduling Coordinators, corresponding Bb shells are automatically generated overnight. 

• If you are an instructor and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your Departmental Scheduling Coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your access to the Bb course shell will be updated automatically.
• If you and your Department Scheduling Coordinator believe you are correctly assigned as the instructor of record in the SOC and you do not see your course shell in Blackboard, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via my.umbc.edu/help.

New Course Merge Request Process

As announced by DoIT in early April, instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will see a separate Blackboard course shell for each section or course component. Courses will not be merged by default. Instructors planning to use separate shells will no longer need to submit an RT request.

Course shells may be merged upon request via RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard. NOTE: Courses should not be merged or split after student grade data and engagement activity is recorded, since it will be purged as part of the separation process.

For more information about these improvements, please see the following:

• Presentation to Faculty Senate Computer Policy Committee (CPC) on March 4, 2025. 

• Updated FAQs & demo video: How to request a merged course

• Common questions about the revised Blackboard course creation & user enrollment process (Google Doc version)

In addition, faculty are invited to attend an information session on May 1, 2025 about the new course creation process and why it matters. It will be a hybrid meeting in ENGR 102 and recorded. 

Create an Inclusive & Accessible Course Environment

Plan your accessibility and Universal Design for Learning strategy before students begin working with course materials. Ally, an accessibility tool, is enabled in all course shells. Ally automatically scans uploaded and created course content, then performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Please review the Ally FAQs for more information about the accessibility indicators on course content and alternative formats, or attend a training session.

Connect with Instructional Technology

• Check our extensive FAQ collection
• What's new in Ultra? | Known Issues
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff