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AI Detector for college students, built around the essay you actually wrote.

Pre-scan your undergrad essays and lab reports before Turnitin or Canvas sees them. Sentence-level highlights show exactly which lines read AI, with perplexity and burstiness signals so you can fix the prose instead of guessing. Calibrated for non-native English writers so formally-taught prose does not get over-flagged. FERPA-aware, no training on student work. Free to try. No card.

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.edu discount on Pro FERPA-aware Sentence-level highlights
Who it is for

Built for undergrad essays and lab reports.

For undergraduates writing 4 to 8 essays a semester across mixed-policy courses, often inside tight midterms and finals windows. The realistic 2026 default is to draft fast, scan before submission, and fix the specific sentences that read AI.

College students face a specific stack of pressures that high schoolers and grad students do not. Volume is higher, policy varies by professor, and false positives hit hardest in the exact register most undergrads were taught to write in. Pre-scanning is the cheapest insurance against a wrongful integrity review for work that is actually yours.

The undergrad essay

Five to twelve pages of structured argument, due across two or three courses in the same week. Free tier covers casual single-essay scans up to 5,000 characters. Pro at $19.99 a month, or $14.99 a month on yearly, unlocks 10,000 character pastes and unlimited scans for the weeks where you are submitting on rotation.

Lab reports and structured assignments

Methods sections, discussion paragraphs, and procedural writing all run a higher false-positive risk than narrative prose because the genre rewards uniform sentence rhythm. Sentence-level highlights are the unlock here so you can see whether a flag is real AI residue or just the genre showing through.

Thesis and capstone writers

Longer documents, multiple revision cycles, and an examiner who is now expected to check for AI. The 90-day Pro history matters when an examiner asks about a draft you submitted three weeks ago. PDF export keeps a defensible record of what you scanned and when.

Fits beside Turnitin and Canvas

A pre-Turnitin draft workflow that finishes before the deadline does.

TextSight is not a Turnitin replacement. It is the pre-submission scan that runs while you edit, so you have sentence-level context before your institution's report decides anything.

Step 1: draft normally

Write the essay in your usual editor. Using ChatGPT for an outline or to break writer's block is the realistic 2026 default and not the issue. Write the prose itself in your own voice from your own notes.

Step 2: paste and scan

Open app.textsight.ai, paste the final draft, and scan. Free tier handles 5,000 characters in one paste. Pro handles 10,000. The scan returns in about thirty seconds with an Authenticity Score and a sentence-by-sentence colour map.

Step 3: read the highlights and edit

Above 75, submit. Between 50 and 75, look at the red sentences and rewrite those specifically. Below 50, the essay needs more substantial editing. The point is to fix the prose that is genuinely AI-shaped, not to game the score on prose you wrote yourself.

Step 4: re-scan and submit

One round of editing usually moves a borderline score by 15 to 25 points. Re-scan, confirm you are in the safe band, then submit to your LMS. A typical four-page essay round-trips in about six minutes.

Plans & pricing

Pricing for undergrads and grad students.

Verified institutional emails get the .edu discount on Pro automatically at signup. Pro is $19.99 a month standard, $14.99 a month on yearly, and $13.99 a month with .edu verification. Full details on the pricing page.

Free
$0/forever

 

Sanity-check a single essay. No card, no email.
  • 3 scans / day
  • 5,000 chars per scan
  • Sentence-level highlights
  • 2 lifetime AI rewriter uses
Start free
Starter
$7.49/month

Billed $89.88/year — Save $30

For a student writing one essay a week.
  • 20 scans / day
  • 20,000 AI rewriter words/mo
  • Chrome extension
  • Email support
Get Starter
Business
$29.99/month

Billed $359.88/year — Save $120

For student writing centres and tutoring teams.
  • 100,000 AI rewriter words/mo
  • 5 team seats, shared history
  • Audit log, REST API
  • White-label PDFs
Get Business

.edu, .ac.uk, .ac.in, and .edu.au emails get Pro at $13.99/mo. The discount applies automatically at signup. View full pricing →

What you see in a scan

Sentence highlights, perplexity, and burstiness.

A single percentage is not a fix path. The TextSight result panel shows which sentences reacted and why, so you can edit the specific lines instead of rewriting the whole essay.

Sentence-level highlights

Every sentence is colour-coded by its own AI-likeness score. Red sentences clustered in one paragraph are a stronger signal than scattered yellows. Scattered yellows in otherwise structured prose often just mean you were taught to write formally. You read the pattern, not just the headline number.

Perplexity, read-only on Pro

Perplexity is how predictable your word choices are to a language model. Low perplexity reads AI-like. The score is shown per-sentence on Pro, which is the diagnostic context you need to decide whether a flag is real AI residue or just an unusually well-rehearsed thesis statement.

Burstiness, read-only on Pro

Burstiness is how much your sentence length and structure vary across the essay. ChatGPT defaults to uniform medium-length sentences. Real student writing has bursty rhythm: one short sentence, one long, one fragment. Low burstiness across an entire essay is the classic AI fingerprint.

Authenticity Score and Plagiarism Risk

Two scores side by side. Authenticity Score is the inverse-AI reading and predicts what Turnitin will say within 5 to 10 points. Plagiarism Risk catches copied passages and citation-risky phrasing in the same scan. Useful because Turnitin runs both checks, and pre-flighting both at once saves a round-trip.

Calibration tool, not verdict

Academic integrity: scores as conversation starters.

Treating any single number as proof that a student used AI is unfair and unreliable. The 2026 expectation is that detection is one input among several. The design here is built around that expectation, on both sides of the conversation.

Use the score as a signal, not a sentence

A low Authenticity Score means your essay reads more AI-like to the classifier. It does not by itself mean you used AI, and it does not by itself mean a professor will accuse you. False positives are real, particularly for ESL writers and for highly-structured academic prose where phrasing overlaps with AI defaults.

If you wrote it yourself and still got flagged

Run the scan and save the PDF report. The report stores the input text, the Authenticity Score, the sentence-level flags, the timestamp, and the classifier version. That is the format an integrity committee actually wants to see, and it gives you something specific to discuss instead of a vague denial.

If you used AI more than you remember

Be honest with yourself when the score is below 50 on prose you thought was mostly yours. ChatGPT-assisted drafting often creeps further into the final essay than students remember. The fix is to rewrite those paragraphs in your own voice, not to rewrite them through another tool.

Auto-fail on a single percentage is bad policy

Several US universities have lost lawsuits in 2025 for auto-failing students on a single detector percentage. Most institutions now require sentence-level evidence, a student conversation, and a review of earlier drafts before any sanction. The score is the start of that process, not the end.

Fits with your LMS

LMS context: Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, and Google Classroom.

Native plugins are not shipped yet. Here is the honest 2026 picture of what works today and what is on the roadmap, so you can plan around it.

Today: copy-paste from your LMS

Draft inside Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, or Google Classroom as you normally would. Before you click submit, copy the final essay text into TextSight at app.textsight.ai. Edit the flagged sentences in TextSight or back in your LMS, then submit the cleaned version. Round-trip is about six minutes for a typical undergrad essay.

Today: file upload on Pro

Drag a DOCX, PDF, or TXT into TextSight if you wrote in Word or Docs. Pro accepts files up to 10,000 characters per scan and returns the same sentence-level result the paste-in workflow does. Useful when you do not want to lose formatting in copy-paste.

Today: Chrome extension

One-click scan from any web page including LMS submission views. Useful when you want to scan an assignment description, a peer review, or a paragraph from your own draft without leaving the tab. Available on Starter and above.

Roadmap: native plugins

Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, and Google Classroom plugins are on the 2026 roadmap. We are not promising dates while LMS plugin requirements keep changing each term. We would rather ship a working integration once than ship a thin wrapper that breaks every semester.

Your essay stays yours

Privacy first, FERPA-aware by default.

Student submissions are protected by FERPA in the US, by GDPR in the EU and the UK, and by local equivalents elsewhere. TextSight is designed to honour those rules out of the box, not as a paid setting you have to find.

No training on student work

Essays you submit for scanning are never used to train the classifier or any other model. This is a contract clause, not a configuration toggle. It applies on the free tier the same way it applies on Pro and Business.

No account required on free

The free tier needs no email, no account, no identity. For students worried about privacy or institutional disclosure, this matters. You can scan an essay without TextSight ever knowing who you are.

Your college does not see your scans

Scan history is private to your account. We do not share scan data with colleges, universities, instructors, Turnitin, or any third party. Your scans are not part of any institutional record, and your professor cannot pull them.

Deletion on request

Any scan can be deleted from your history. On Pro you can delete individual records. Data retention is bound to your settings, and a standard DPA is available on Business and Enterprise tiers for student writing centres and tutoring teams.

FAQ

College students frequently ask.

Will TextSight match what my college's Turnitin actually shows?
Within 5 to 10 percentage points in our internal testing against 2,400 college student essays. A TextSight Authenticity Score of 80 typically corresponds to a Turnitin AI percentage under 15. A TextSight score below 50 typically corresponds to Turnitin above 40. Use TextSight as the pre-submission pre-flight and treat Turnitin's actual report as the source of truth for the institutional record.
Does my college have access to my TextSight scans?
No. TextSight scans are private to your account. The free tier does not require an email or any identity. Paid tier scan history is visible only to you. We do not share scan data with colleges, universities, instructors, Turnitin, or any third party. Your scans are not part of any institutional record, and student text is never used to train the classifier.
What is the .edu discount?
Students who sign up with a verified institutional email such as .edu, .ac.uk, .ac.in, or .edu.au get Pro at $13.99 a month instead of the standard $19.99. Pro includes unlimited scans, a 10,000 character cap per scan, 90-day scan history, file upload, and the integrated AI rewriter. The discount applies automatically at signup.
Does TextSight integrate with Canvas, Blackboard, or Google Classroom?
Native LMS plugins are not shipped yet. The honest workflow today is to draft in Word, Docs, or your LMS editor, copy the final essay into TextSight to scan, edit the flagged sentences, then paste the cleaned version back into your LMS for submission. Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, and Google Classroom integrations are on the roadmap.
What about false positives for ESL or international students?
False positives on non-native English writing are real and well-documented. Detectors over-flag structured English from non-native writers at several times the rate of native US writers. The TextSight classifier was tuned against essays from Indian, Filipino, Nigerian, Chinese, and other large ESL student populations. False positive rates are roughly 40 percent lower than for US-only competitors. Scattered yellow flags in otherwise structured prose usually reflect formal English instruction, not actual AI use.
What if my college has a strict no-AI policy?
TextSight is most useful when you wrote the work yourself. Many colleges with strict no-AI policies still see false-positive Turnitin flags on essays students wrote themselves, especially for non-native English writers and highly-structured academic prose. Pre-scanning catches these patterns before submission so you do not get pulled into an integrity review for work that is actually yours. The score is a conversation starter, not a verdict.
Will TextSight train its model on the essay I scan?
No. Student text submitted for scanning is never used to train the classifier or any other model. Data retention is bound to your history settings, deletion on request is supported, and our privacy practices are designed to be FERPA-aware in the US, GDPR-aware in the EU and UK, and aligned with local equivalents elsewhere.
What do the perplexity and burstiness signals mean?
Perplexity is how predictable your word choices are to a language model. Low perplexity reads more AI-like. Burstiness is how much your sentence length and structure vary across the essay. Low burstiness reads more AI-like. Mixed perplexity with normal burstiness is the typical human pattern. TextSight surfaces both read-only on Pro so you can understand why a sentence was flagged, not just that it was.
Related

More for college students.

Pre-scan an essay. Submit clean. Sleep easy.

Free to try. No card. .edu Pro at $13.99/mo for verified institutional emails.

Start free, no card See pricing
FERPA-aware · No training on student work · Sentence-level highlights · .edu discount on Pro