So Studiosity have bought out a wee Nordic company called Norvalid and are planning to integrate it into their service, and I was lucky enough to be given a sneak preview today. I think I need to be a little careful about what I say for the time being, but as Norvalid has been around for a while, I feel like it’s okay to talk about what they do.
Norvalid sprang up in response to the need to ensure academic integrity in the GenAI age, but are taking a different approach from the constant monitoring / police and punish model that we’ve seen to date from the likes of Turnitin (via Clarity) and Grammarly. Instead, Norvalid looks to do two things. First, it examines the ‘perplexity’ of a piece of writing, looking for the qualities it has of being human authored – so the opposite of trying to check for machine authored text. Secondly, it can then generate two different types of quiz based on that specific piece of writing which students have to answer as a check of their knowledge. The idea being that if they have indeed written the piece submitted, this should be quite straightforward. Kind of like a machine-generated mini viva.
Now under the umbrella of Studiosity, Norvalid will be integrated into their AI powered Writing Feedback service, and it will be offered to partners as an optional extra. Details and pricing to follow, after a trial with a small number of institutions over the summer.