GenAI: Check

Check for signals of GenAI use or use outside of defined acceptable limits

When grading assessments, you are expected to check for signals that indicate potential breaches of academic integrity. This includes the more traditional types of breaches such as plagiarism and recycling as well as signals associated with GenAI use beyond the acceptable limits. As a marker, be sure to look carefully at the assessment brief statement to be clear about what the Unit Assessor has defined as the limits for acceptable use of GenAI.

SCU Academic Integrity Guidelines have been adapted to reflect the use of GenAI tools beyond the acceptable limit as specified for the Assessment, or utilising GenAI tools without proper acknowledgment, could be considered a breach of academic integrity.

  • While Turnitin Similarity reports can be used for detecting matching (retrievable) text, unfortunately a similarity report does not match for GenAI outputs.
  • Turnitin also has an Artificial Intelligence report; however, percentage probabilities are not a reliable indicator that GenAI was used.
  • Other GenAI detection tools, such as ZeroGPT, also have a limited capacity to detect GenAI (Sadasivan et al., 2023), and are problematic in terms of entering a student's work without their permission into a third party GenAI tool.

Hence, checking for GenAI related breaches of Academic Integrity should not be reliant on a single piece of evidence or signal of suspicion. The GenAI Practice Guide includes a checklist of signals of potential unacceptable use of GenAI, along with guidelines on collecting relevant evidence.

Policy note

When the use of a particular technology, tool or resource for completion of an assessment task is prohibited, the method of assessment must enable the Unit Assessor to verify with reasonable certainty that these requirements have been met and academic integrity has not been breached.

(16) Assessment, Teaching and Learning Procedures / Document / Policy Library (scu.edu.au)

In the context of academic integrity, the Academic Portfolio Office and SCU policies, procedures and guidelines provide information and resources on how to check for signals of GenAI and academic integrity breaches, and the responsibility of markers, Unit Assessors and Academic Integrity Officers.

Once you have considered the Check aspects of your assessment, continue with the rest of the assessment design process by clicking on Evaluate, Design, Analyse, Act, Inform and Educate.   


Sadasivan, S., Kumar, V., Balasubramanian, S., Wang, W., & Feizi, S. (2023, June 28). Can AI-generated text be reliably detected? Arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.11156


Note: Given the rapidly evolving nature of GenAI technologies and largely opinion-based and low-level evidence on emerging practices for use in higher education, this resource represents the status quo at the time of writing (Aug 2023). As changes to policies and technology develop and evidence for best practice emerges, practice recommendations as outlined here are likely to continue to change and develop.