My Anti-Plagiarism Advice for Students in 2025

For the past few years around this time, I’ve written articles offering my advice for students in the upcoming school year.

In 2023, I laid out seven academic integrity tips for students, and now, two years later, they all hold up very well.

Last year, I focused on a singular piece of advice: talking to your instructors if you feel that you are struggling and avoiding the various temptations to take shortcuts. That advice also holds up well this year.

In many ways, 2025 is almost the same as the past few years. The public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 drastically changed the course of academic integrity, and we are still feeling those issues today.

But there are a few key differences, all of them driven by the explosive growth of AI.

1: You Must Actively Avoid AI

In 2023, avoiding AI was more a matter of not giving in to temptation. In 2025, that game has changed significantly.

AI is everywhere. Microsoft put Copilot into Microsoft Word. Google’s Gemini is in Google Docs, and Grammarly has multiple AI features. AI is actively in the spaces that you are using, often aggressively trying to get you to use it.

Whether it is autosummarizing your pages, offering to help you start a new document or automatically editing your writing, AI is there. It’s no longer something users enable, but something that they have to disable.

As we have seen in other spaces, opt-out policies increase participation. Whether it’s organ donation, 401K plans or AI, people are more likely to participate in systems where they are opted in by default.

For students, this means you must be more proactive in deciding when and whether to use AI. That, in turn, means asking some challenging questions.

2: Ask Lots of Questions

One positive this year is that, unlike 2023 and 2024, schools and instructors should be much more aware of AI and have policies for when and how students can use it.

The first step is to review your school’s policies. This involves examining the student handbook and the school’s policies on its website. Although this applies to all areas of academic integrity, AI is especially important. The AI policy is the one most likely to have changed, so it is crucial to get the most current information.

However, bear in mind that your instructors are the ultimate arbiters. While they, too, should have clear AI policies, if they don’t, talk with them and find out what they expect from you.

Asking questions not only helps clarify boundaries but also makes it so that, if something does go amiss, the instructor knows you were trying to comply and can take that into account.

In short, care about these issues proactively and make sure you know what is expected of you before typing your first word.

3: Use Turnitin Clarity, Grammarly Authorship or a Similar Tool

In previous articles, I’ve touted the importance of using a writing tool with versioning. This includes Microsoft Word, Google Docs and most other modern word processors.

However, tools like Turnitin Clarity and Grammarly Authorship provide much greater detail about how a piece was written by offering more control over the writing environment.

Though AI detection has improved significantly, false positives can still happen and using one of these tools could provide the evidence needed to counter a false positive.

As a student, you should be prepared to explain how an assignment was written. Part of that is simply knowing the content, having great notes and writing in a cleanroom environment. However, having digital proof will not hurt either.

If you can, use one of these tools or something similar. They can help you verify your human authorship.

4: Avoid AI Polishing

One risk you definitely want to be mindful of is using AI to polish your work.

To be clear, some schools or instructors may allow you to use AI to edit or correct your work. After all, that is not much different than having a parent or tutor help your assignment.

The problem is that AI-polished papers often show up as being AI-generated. A recent study found that, while fully human generated text produced few false positives, but even “extremely minor” amounts of AI polishing cause it to be flagged as AI text.

While there’s obviously room for debate about whether that amounts to a false positive, it’s important to note that AI polishing may cause your papers to get flagged as AI-generated.

As such, you need to be aware of the gradient of AI usage and ensure that your work is as close to 1 or 2 that you can.

5: Be Aware of AI Grading

Though most of the focus on academia and AI has been on student use, teachers are also beginning to increasingly use it, especially when it comes to assignment creation and assessment

AI assisted grading tools like Gradescope, Timelygrader and Canvas SpeedGrader have been around for years but have been increasing both in automation and usage.

When doing an assignment, be sure to read the rubic and the question very closely. Ensure that what you submit has all the required elements and does so in a way/language that the automated tools can understand.

While this has always been good advice for students, it’s becoming even more important as more assessment is automated. In the past, human graders have often been able to understand what a student intended, automated tools are more likely to struggle.

So understand that your work may be at least partly evaluated by automated tools. In that regard, it’s not much different than what job seekers experience with their resumes, so it may be one of the most realistic and relevant parts of assessment.

Bottom Line

AI isn’t going anywhere. As dominant as it was in 2023, it’s now in more places, offering to do more things and finding more uses, good and bad.

For students, this makes every assignment a minefield. AI is getting more difficult to avoid and, though false positives are rare, they are still common enough that students need to guard against them.

The main thing for students to remember is that they need to understand what the rules of their assignments are, how they will be graded and what will happen if there are any concerns from the instructor.

This is a situation where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you ask questions, carefully choose your writing enviornment and avoid using AI without explicit permission, you’ll likely be fine.

As scary of a time as the post-AI world often is, many of the fears dissipate once you know the boundaries and what your instructors are looking for.