Beta Test Guide

What Emma Is and Why You Need Her 

Emma is an AI-powered self-learning assistant that examines writing styles and helps instructors identify students for whom writing original content in English is a challenging task. 

Emma’s mission is to hold back contract cheating and boost original thinking among students. She verifies the authorship of a student’s paper and tells an instructor whether the paper was written by the particular student. 

Unicheck’s R&D team has been developing a proprietary machine learning technology for several years. In 2017, it was first presented by our team and was well-received by the scientific community in Belgium at the International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (the publication can be found here). Since then, our team has significantly improved the technology, and now Emma is ready to be launched. 

Who Benefits from Emma?

Educators

It is often hard to detect contract cheating in student assignments, and educators have their hands full with manual tasks. Emma can streamline the process of authorship verification and paper grading, providing an invaluable expertise and saving a lot of time.

Emma has her own tab in the Unicheck similarity report to share her assessment of the paper. No manuals, no additional tools, no extra buttons. Everything happens automatically inside the Unicheck plagiarism checker.

Students

An ever-lengthening hunt for better grades puts students under a lot of stress, and written assignments require significant effort. Unfortunately, some students prefer an easy path and use the services of numerous “essay mills” available online. Knowing that their institution uses Emma, students will be motivated to write original content and reach out to instructors for personal advice. Ultimately, students will benefit from higher-quality education rather than losing the opportunity to learn. 

In the near future, Emma will be able to provide students with insightful analytics, helping them evaluate their language fluency and improve writing skills.

LMS Administrators

Rather than having a separate tool for authorship verification, Unicheck has embedded Emma into the similarity report. Emma launches automatically and works simultaneously with a similarity check, so LMS administrators don’t have to spend time setting her up or integrating additional software.

By combining all these upgrades into one tool, Unicheck aims to provide maximum benefit to all users.

What Emma Does?

She analyzes the writing style of a student based on his/her previous original submissions. After a self-training period, Emma verifies the authorship of subsequent student papers and shows notifications to an instructor, informing whether those papers were written by that student.

Being an integral part of the Unicheck plagiarism checker, Emma is automatically launched the moment Unicheck's similarity check starts, so no extra setup or guidance is needed. 

Emma will show notifications to instructors, telling them whether she thinks the paper was written by the particular student.  

To examine the text, Emma uses stylometry and natural language processing. This enables her to divide the text into linguistic and stylistic components and study the student’s voice in depth.

What is Required to Start Using Emma?

We invite you to participate in beta testing, and here are a few things that would be needed to test Emma in your environment:

• Unicheck is integrated into your LMS as an external app (LTI integration) or via Canvas Plagiarism Framework integration.
  
  
• At least 1 course with at least 7 students enrolled.
   
• At least 7 students will submit at least 3 original papers each within the course (a paper must have at least 300 words (English only), the combined word count of the papers must be at least 3,000 words per student). Emma will use these initial papers for self-training purposes only and will not verify the authorship of such papers.

The self-training period will be over when the above criteria are met. From that point onwards, Emma will start verifying the authorship of all subsequent submissions made by these students. Verification of submissions made by each of the remaining students in the course will start once Emma completes her self-training period for each student.

To test Emma in your LMS, just drop us a line at support@unicheck.com or give us a call at +12819120548.

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