Students who write where their teacher can see the process are less likely to hand the whole job to AI, according to Turnitin’s latest Learning Integrity Insights Report.
The Q3 report compares work written inside Turnitin Clarity against work written elsewhere and submitted through Turnitin. Clarity is the company’s writing environment, and it has a built-in AI assistant. The report counts a submission as near-total outsourcing when its AI writing score is above 80%.
For Australian and New Zealand students, that happened in 6.7% of submissions written outside Clarity and 3.96% of those written inside it. That’s about 40% fewer.
The report doesn’t separate the two countries. The Clarity sample is also small, with 956 submissions against more than 312,000 written elsewhere between 1 July 2025 and 26 August 2026.
Australian and New Zealand students were already well below the US, where the figures were 14.3% outside Clarity and 7.6% inside. In the UK they were 9.6% and 7.2%.
Annie Chechitelli, Turnitin’s chief product officer, says the difference comes down to transparency.
“Transparency is key to better learning outcomes,” Annie says. “A transparent writing space, like Turnitin Clarity, gives educators visibility into how a student’s work comes together, allowing them to provide more meaningful guidance.
“When students understand how their work is being evaluated, the anxiety around AI detection can be reduced, along with the temptation to outsource their thinking entirely. The result is a learning environment that protects critical thinking and nurtures learning integrity.”
Most students don’t touch the assistant
Turnitin analysed more than 840,000 prompts sent to the Clarity assistant by users in the US, the UK and Australia/New Zealand. In 66% of pieces of writing, the student didn’t use the assistant at all.
In 20% they used between one and five prompts, and in 14% they used six or more. Turnitin says the pattern held in both secondary and higher education, and in all three regions.
How students used it depended on their level. Secondary students used it early in their writing. Of nearly 22,000 preset prompts they used, help brainstorming (4,140 times) and help drafting an outline (3,764 times) were the most popular.
Higher education students used it more to check their work. Their top preset prompt was feedback against rubrics and assignment organisation, used 1,976 times.
Policy versus the classroom
Both institutions and individual educators can set how the Clarity assistant runs. Across 957 institutions and more than 19,000 assignments, Turnitin found half of institutions kept it always on. Another 45% let it be switched on or off for each assignment or class, and 5% turned it off entirely.
Educators made less use of that flexibility. In 73% of classes the assistant was always on, and in 13% it was always off.
Turnitin argues the gap matters. Its release says institutional AI policies “remain little more than words on a page” unless educators have tools to adjust AI access assignment by assignment. Without those tools, it says, educators are left with an all-or-nothing choice that “neither protects learning integrity nor teaches students the skills to use AI responsibly”.
For school leaders reviewing their own AI settings, the classroom figures raise a practical question. Does the school’s policy show up in how each assignment is set, or does every class end up with the same default?
