Seeing which answers were pasted in

Signal shows you whether a written answer was typed or pasted. If a student pastes text into their answer and it’s still there when they submit, the response is flagged, and you can highlight exactly which words were pasted.

When to use it: You’re reading through explanations or written answers and want to know which ones a student wrote themselves, or an answer doesn’t sound like the student and you want to see which parts came from elsewhere before you talk to them.

It covers the reason a student gives with a quiz or poll answer, open answers, and in an Assessment, their confidence comment and reflection. Only teachers see it. Students and parents don’t, and it never appears on presenter view.

On a response: Pasted in

A response with pasted text in it shows Pasted in, in blue, in the line under the answer, beside timings such as Typed for.

1. Find the response in the question’s results, or open it.
2. Hover over Pasted in. The pasted words light up in blue inside the answer.
3. To keep them highlighted, select Pasted in. Select it again to turn the highlight off.

The highlight is off the rest of the time, so answers stay easy to read.

On confidence comments and reflections: Pasted

In an Assessment, a student’s confidence comment or reflection with pasted text in it shows Pasted.

• Hover over it to highlight the pasted words.
• Select it to open Pasted text, which lists each stretch of text that was pasted.

How it’s detected

• It’s reported by the student’s browser. When a student pastes into an answer box, their browser notes the text that was pasted and sends that along with the answer.
• Only text that’s still there counts. If a student pastes something and then deletes it, the answer isn’t flagged. If they paste a paragraph and then edit it, the parts that survive are the parts highlighted.
• Repeated words may not be highlighted. If the pasted words also appear elsewhere in the answer, Signal can’t tell which copy was pasted, so it doesn’t highlight them. The flag still shows.

Whether a written answer was typed or pasted is one of two behavioural signals Signal records, alongside leaving the session view.

In the results charts

Explanations

Quiz and poll questions where students gave a reason have an Explanations card. It counts the explanations under:

• Potential guess: only on questions with a correct answer.
• Low effort
• Pasted in: the explanation was pasted in rather than typed.
• Own reasoning: typed, with none of the other signals.

One explanation can appear under more than one of these. A pasted explanation can also be a potential guess, for example.

These counts are Premium. On the Standard plan every count on the card, Pasted in included, shows ?, with a Premium crown. That’s deliberate: a real pasted count next to unchecked guess counts would suggest the rest had been checked and found clean. The Pasted in flag on each response still shows on every plan.

Written answers

Open answer questions have a Written answers card instead, counting answers that were Pasted in and answers students Typed themselves, with the median time spent typing. This card is on every plan.

What it doesn’t tell you

• It’s not a verdict. A pasted answer isn’t marked wrong or treated as a guess, and it doesn’t change a student’s score, the accuracy figure or the recommendation. It’s a signal to look at the response.
• It doesn’t say where the text came from. Text pasted from the student’s own notes looks the same as text from a website, a classmate or an AI tool.
• It only knows about pasting. Text a student types out, whatever they copied it from, counts as typed.

Tip: Treat a flag as the start of a conversation. A student may have drafted their answer somewhere else and pasted it in.