The tools will never be perfectly reliable. It’s good that people like you are aware that it’s a statistical tool, not a perfect oracle.

For student work I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram positive across 10 assignments shouldn’t be enough to bring suspicion upon a student, but when 8 out of 10 of someone’s assignments are coming up as AI it’s time to talk.

The trend I’m hearing from my teacher friends is that students are generating AI papers and then putting them into tools like ZeroGPT and Pangram before submission. They do what you did: Remove sections, rewrite things, and make adjustments until the AI score goes down enough.

I heard that one classroom had developed a trick of adding spelling mistakes to ChatGPT output to try to make it look human written. So the teacher was getting pure AI slop but every paragraph had a couple typos inserted.

As for the 3 bullet points: That was a huge tell for one of the recent popular models. Almost all writing output would get sections of plus or minus 3 bullet points in a certain style. The newer frontier models do it less but that was a big LLM pattern for a while. Unfortunate for anyone who liked to write with 3 bullet points commonly. They’re feeling the pain of people who were emdash enjoyers before 2023

> I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram

Strong disagree here. If a tool fails the basic test of teacher getting flagged on some text that they wrote personally, that tool should never be used. Being accused of cheating can have huge repercussions on a student's future. No way should a black-box classifier be used to decide their fate.