Be honest. Have you ever paid someone to write a paper for you while in college? Before technology advanced, this may have looked like handing a friend $20 and telling them to give it their best shot. Nowadays, people called ghostwriters are paid by students to write things like papers and speeches that students can submit as their own work.
This approach makes plagiarism detection more difficult for educators.
Park Hills resident Barry Burkett is an instructional designer and the co-founder (along with Wasi Khan) of the Northern Kentucky-based company Sikanai, an education technology startup. Khan is a former ghostwriter living in Pakistan and knows the industry from the inside out. The two met online while discussing the growth of ghostwriters in classes while Burkett was teaching at Eastern Kentucky University. They recognized a gap in the market for plagiarism detection in higher education and created a program called Auth+.
After a student submits an assignment, a professor sends them a link to the Auth+ portal, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create quizzes of six questions unique to the student’s writing, which tests style, content, and memory. The program does this through multiple choice questions and fill-in-the-blank prompts to test for lexical similarity or the measurement of how similar two-word sets are.
In other words, if you’re the student, it’s testing how well you know your own vocabulary.
The questions are under a time limit that makes it hard for the student to try and look up the correct answers, as well as software detecting if additional windows are open. The program then delivers a report for the teacher/professor to review.
“It gives instructors the idea not if you cheated but how familiar you are with what you wrote and if the instructor should follow up with you based on the results,” Burkett said.
The current plagiarism detection software at schools is programs like Safeassign and Turnitin. Burkett said those programs use an open domain that cross-references a base of information to determine if students are copying and pasting from other articles or using unoriginal content. The issue with those programs is unique content is not detected, so they can’t tell if a ghostwriter is involved.
Auth+ is a flagship product of Sikanai and has been in operation for about one year. While the company is currently meeting with schools and demoing its product to get it out and in service, it applied to work with an international incubator to explore its options within the market.
Sikanai is working with SuperCharger Ventures, an international education technology incubator based in London, Singapore, and Hong Kong. SuperCharger Ventures’ “Incubator 2.0” cohort will help Burkett and Khan see where their product fits in the market. Burkett said the 19-member cohort is attending a 24-week program where participants learn alongside one another while attending startup education panels, receive mentorship, and building capability.
“At the end of the program, we will have the opportunity to speak with the network of investors at SuperCharger Ventures to see if they will work with us,” Burkett said.
Sikanai is also working with the Kentucky Small Business Development Center (KSBDC) to help create business plans, funding, and basic business fundamentals.
Burkett said while the product was made with the higher education market in mind, he had seen interest in people who work at the high school level and community journalism centers.
“It’s a flagship product, but we’re seeing the potential around it,” Burkett said.
