About TeacherDetect

TeacherDetect is an independent review site that helps teachers grade fairly in the AI era. A detector score can start an academic-integrity case, and a wrong one can wreck a student's record, so we think the people recommending these tools owe you real test data, not vendor copy. We run the detectors teachers actually ask about against real student-style essays and publish what happens, including the failures.

How We Test

Every ranking on this site starts with a test, not a spec sheet. In our August 2026 round we built a 12-sample set: 4 fully AI-written essays, 4 human-written pieces (including public-domain excerpts and hand-written student-style work), 2 AI essays paraphrased by hand to simulate a humanizer wash, and 2 written in a non-native English learner style, because false alarms on ESL work are the most damaging failure mode. Each detector saw identical pasted text.

We ran two rounds. Round one, anonymous: we pasted samples into the free web scanners of ZeroGPT, GPTZero, Pangram, and Winston AI and recorded where each one worked, errored, or demanded an account. Round two, with accounts: we registered where a signup wall allowed it and scanned again. Our policy is to stop at captchas and bot checks rather than bypass them, so GPTZero and Winston AI stayed untested. The full test matrix, sample texts, provenance files, and raw verdicts are published in our test-samples archive.

Vendor claims are labeled as vendor claims. Paid tools we did not buy this round, such as Originality.ai, are ranked on official documentation and named third-party reviews, and the card says so in plain words. Independent findings come from named sources, like the 2023 Stanford-led study in Patterns on false flags for English learners. We retest each school term because these tools retrain constantly.

Editorial Policy

Independent testing. Rankings are based on our own test results, official product documentation, and named third-party research. No vendor pays for a position, and no ranking is for sale.

Affiliate disclosure. Some links on this site are affiliate links, marked rel="sponsored". If you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Commissions never change a verdict; when a price or a claim no longer matches our testing, the page gets the correction in the same retest cycle.

Corrections. Found an error, a changed price, or a claim that reads wrong? Email [email protected] and we will fix it in the same retest cycle.

Who Runs TeacherDetect

TeacherDetect is run by a small editorial team of indie publishers who build and maintain education reference sites. We do the testing and writing ourselves, publish under the TeacherDetect Editorial Team byline, and keep the site free to read by using affiliate links and keeping costs low. No venture funding, no vendor sponsors, no paid placements.