AI detectors flag honest students and miss dishonest ones — they guess from the finished text and get it wrong in both directions. Folio Classroom takes the opposite approach: instead of a probability score, you get positive evidence of how each document was actually written. One link in your syllabus, and the rest follows.
It's free for instructors.
Create an assignment
Open Classroom from your profile menu and choose New assignment. You'll set:
- Title — what students see (e.g. "Essay 2 — Argument analysis").
- Instructions (optional) — any brief the students should read before they start.
- Due date (optional) — submissions after it are flagged late on your roster, but never blocked.
- Reviewer rubric (optional) — one of Folio's built-in rubrics; students are told to self-review against the same dimensions you grade on.
- Grading criteria (optional) — your own dimensions, in your words. Students see them under "How you'll be graded"; you see them as a reference while grading.
You get one shareable link — that's the entire setup. Put usefolio.co/a/YOURCODE in your syllabus, your LMS, or an email.
How students submit
A student opens your link, signs in (a free account takes under a minute), and joins. Joining shares their name and email with you — the page tells them so before they commit.
They then pick a document they've written in Folio and submit it. Submitting publishes the document's Integrity Certificate — that is the submission. Each certificate records:
- word count and the number of saved revisions,
- citations verified against CrossRef,
- every AI-assist action, disclosed,
- a writing-process signal derived from the edit history, and
- a tamper-evident fingerprint of that history.
Students can resubmit right up until you close the assignment; a resubmission mints a fresh certificate and clears any earlier grade.
Students get the strongest record when they draft in Folio, where the process is captured as it happens. They can import existing work, but the certificate attests to what Folio actually saw.
Read, grade, and export from one roster
Open any assignment to see its roster. At the top, a quick summary: how many submitted, how many on time, how many graded, and the writing-process breakdown — including any submissions marked single burst, which are simply worth a closer read rather than an accusation.
For each submission you can:
- Read it in place — a clean, read-only view of the document, right on the roster. No editor, no distractions.
- Grade it — a grade in your own scheme (
A-,17/20,Pass) plus written feedback. Saving notifies the student, who sees the grade and feedback on their assignment page. - Download it as a
.docx, references included. - Verify the certificate — the same public link anyone can check.
Grading usually happens after you close an assignment, and that's fine: students keep seeing their submission and grade after it closes.
Take everything to your gradebook
Two exports live at the top of the roster:
- CSV — the whole roster (names, word counts, process bands, grades, feedback, late flags, certificate links) for import into any gradebook.
- All .docx (.zip) — every submission as a Word file named Student Name — Document Title.docx, ready for offline grading or upload to Moodle, Canvas, or wherever you already work.
Why this beats an AI detector
A detector asks "does this look AI-written?" and punishes the students whose honest prose happens to look tidy. Folio asks "how did this document actually come together?" and shows you the answer: the revisions, the sessions, the sources, the disclosed AI use. Only a single-burst history is a flag — and even then it's a prompt to read more closely, not a verdict. Everything else is the evidence a careful writer wants on their side.
Already collected work elsewhere? You can verify any batch of certificate codes at usefolio.co/check.