A few notes on analytics:

• Authorship: this is our ML model ensuring the same student is the author. An initial sample is required from students for this to work.
• Effort: this is calculated as “verbosity” (total typing activity) divided by the character count in the final submission. For writing without AI or pastes this is 100% or higher (in some cases, much higher).*
• Duration: this is an accurate representation of the time a student took to work on the submission (removing long pauses or inactivity).

*A deeper look at Effort as a new measure for writing:

Effort

Effort is a new calculation made possible by having access to both the student writing process and the final static text or submission.  

With Cursive’s focus on the writing process, additional relevant and important information is quantified during their drafting and editing phase. Drafting, editing, revisions, and corrections are the “work” in writing, generating additional keypresses not included in the static final submission. 

In short, students write more than what’s ultimately submitted. This calculation helps to highlight the extent to which students have edited, reworked, and polished their ultimate submission. 

The number is calculated by quantifying the total characters from the production process and dividing it by the total number of characters in the final submission to Moodle (including spaces). 

Example

Here’s a very short illustration where edited text is struck through to signify it being deleted. 

Once upon a time, long, long ago, a student wrote a story with too many extra characters. 

The unedited text is 90 characters. But if the strikethrough text is removed (similar to how edited text would not be included) the remainder is 

A student wrote a story with extra characters.

Which is 46 characters. 

90 / 46 =  1.95

As a ratio, this ranges from 0 to infinity (generally remaining in the low single digits). 

<100% suggests the existence of text not attributed to the student during the writing process (pasted text, generative AI text inserted through the browser, or text entered in a means other than the keyboard, such as speech-to-text). 

Below is a general frame of reference for the Effort (Cursive’s interface displays these as %).