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Essay assignments at home

MATCHA's whole-process pedagogy provides students with richer feedback while making AI misuse impractical.

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Marker-doodle illustration of a student researching and writing an essay at home

Bring back essay assignments with whole-process pedagogy

MATCHA's whole-process assessment method makes essay assignments fair again while removing the need to police AI misuse.

It's simple: use MATCHA's Complete Work History feature to track all reading, note-taking, and editing done by your students. MATCHA will give you easy-to-understand statistics and graphics allowing you to assign marks to reward and encourage a good work process. It's better pedagogy, and it makes AI misuse impractical.

As an extra precaution and an opportunity for students to deepen their reflection, MATCHA also facilitates in-person follow-up quizzes.

How it works

Using MATCHA for unsupervised activities

  1. The instructor creates an activity on the Instructor Dashboard, enabling Complete Work History. Optionally, they prepare a follow-up quiz using general questions as well as AI prompts for student-specific questions.

  2. Students install MATCHA on their computers and start the activity using the access code provided by their instructor (or a link on the course website if LTI is enabled).

  3. Students do all their reading, note-taking, and writing in MATCHA, which records all their work. They use it much like a regular word processor and browser.

  4. Students submit their work using the in-app submission tool.

  5. If enabled, MATCHA's AI generates student-specific questions for the follow-up quiz.

  6. The instructor or an assistant grades essays using MATCHA's integrated grading tool. Students are assessed on their reading and composition process, not just the resulting essay.

  7. If desired, students take the follow-up quiz in class.

  8. MATCHA's AI provides a preliminary evaluation of the follow-up quizzes to help the instructor focus on the cases that need the most attention.

The MATCHA formula to stop AI misuse at home

complete work history+in-person follow-up quiz=real work

Key features for essay assignments at home

Complete Work History

Activities can be configured to record all work done within the built-in browser, note tool, and editor. MATCHA will provide graphical and numerical summaries while allowing you to replay the work process. You will know how much of each reference cited was read and exactly how much editing was done. This allows you to reward effort and process, not just the output, which both helps students learn good methods and makes AI cheating harder.

Explore Complete Work History on the Features page
Browsing analysis screenshot

Follow-up quizzes

Generate instructor-managed, AI-assisted follow-up quizzes based on each student's essay and work history. Used in person, these quizzes help verify authorship for unsupervised assignments while giving students an opportunity to deepen their reflection with feedback.

Explore Follow-up quizzes on the Features page
Follow-up quizzes screenshot

How MATCHA compares

with other edit-tracking software when used at home (for example, Turnitin Clarity or Draftback)

  • Complete Work History

    Other edit-tracking software does not record all browsing and reading, which is key to an AI-resistant pedagogy.

  • Follow-Up Quizzes

    Other edit-tracking software does not generate authorship quizzes or provide a secure environment to take these quizzes.

  • Automation Blocking

    Other edit-tracking editors run in the browser, which means they can easily be circumvented using browser plugins, auto-typers, and AI agents that can control the browser (now available from major AI vendors such as Anthropic and OpenAI). Only a standalone app with OS-native functionality can defend against these widespread, off-the-shelf cheating methods.

  • More powerful editing features

    MATCHA comes with unique and powerful writing tools that facilitate proper academic writing, such as Pedagogical AI, Auto Citing, and Direct Citing.

Learn how to create AI-resistant essay assignments with MATCHA

Other uses

MATCHA's authorship certification features have many other uses.

Introductory offer

Create an instructor account with a verified academic email before October 23, 2026 and get 200 free student seats for this calendar year.

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