Show your work: An exploratory study of student experiences of Turnitin Clarity

Abstract

Process-capture platforms promise to make the writing behind an assessed artefact visible, and vendors increasingly market them as a fairness measure rather than a detection tool. Their acceptability to the students who must write within them, however, is largely untested. This exploratory qualitative study examines how students' expectations of one such platform, Turnitin Clarity, compared with their experience of using it. Seven students at a UK university, given no onboarding to the platform, took part in pre-use focus groups. Six then completed an unassessed 500-word writing task over five days, before all seven returned for a post-use focus group. Data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with Expectation-Confirmation Theory as an orienting frame. The overall pattern was one of mixed confirmation. Participants' functional expectations were largely met, and the sense of being watched that they had anticipated persisted after use: for some it was offset by perceived fairness, while for others it heightened self-monitoring. The bounded AI assistant divided them: its limits were welcomed for marking out acceptable use, but some felt it weakened their ownership of the work and worried it would flatten what they produced. Across both phases, participants weighed the costs of observation against perceived gains in fairness and asked for transparency to run in both directions. Several described already writing defensively in anticipation of accusations of AI misuse. Acceptance of process technologies was reported as being conditional on practice time, two-way transparency, and explicit data governance. Participants also questioned whether a single linear document can represent a writing process they described as messy and multimodal. Across these accounts, process capture did not sit outside the writing it recorded but reorganised the practice it set out to observe.