u/Dubbtime

With AI making take-home essays almost impossible to grade with confidence, I've been looking for ways to verify student learning without just reverting to in-class, handwritten papers (which don't reflect real-world writing).

The gold standard has always been the oral defense, but doing that 120+ times a week is impossible for any teacher.

I've been working on a platform called Dubbel that attempts to scale this concept. When a student submits a paper, the tool reads it and builds a personalized mini-quiz asking them to defend their work. It does this for all your students at once.

Then, you can choose when to hold a live, in-class session for the entire class simultaneously. Handle a whole classroom in 5 minutes.

For example:

• "You took [X stance] in your third paragraph. What was your core reasoning behind that position?"
• "Which of these quotes did you use to support your thesis about [Character]?"

When you go to grade, you get a side-by-side view showing the student's original essay right next to their answers from the interview session. It makes it incredibly obvious who actually understands their own writing and who is just passing off an AI draft they haven't read.

It doesn't tell you if AI wrote the paper (we all know AI detectors don't work anyway). Instead, it tells you if the student actually understands the concepts and arguments in the paper they submitted. And faster than holding 1 on 1 meetings.

If anyone is interested in piloting this approach for an upcoming essay, I'd love to get your feedback and see if it holds up in a real ELA classroom: https://dubbel.me/

Beyond this, how are you all adapting your essay assessments right now? Are you doing mostly in-class writing?

If you're a teacher, you already know AI detectors (Turnitin, GPTZero) are pretty much broken. False positives, stressed students, and an arms race you can't win.

There is an app called Dubbel that takes a completely different approach. Instead of scanning an essay to guess if AI wrote it, it reads the essay and generates a short, personalized interview for the student based on their own text.

It pulls from their specific thesis, evidence, and structure. Asking things like why they chose a particular quote, or how a concept connects to their argument. The teacher runs a quick 5-minute live session in class where everyone answers their unique questions at the same time.

If a student actually wrote and understood their essay, they breeze through it. If they copy-pasted from ChatGPT without reading it, they can't answer basic questions about their own words.

When you go to grade, you get a side-by-side view: the polished essay next to a transcript of the student explaining their ideas in their own voice. It's basically a director's commentary on the essay that makes grading way more informative

Link: dubbel.me

You suspect a student didn't write their essay, so you have to pull them aside, ask them to explain their work, maybe escalate it. But even when you're right, the whole process feels adversarial. And if you're wrong, you've just damaged trust with that student.

The core problem is that most approaches to this start with "did you write this?" this puts you in detective mode. I wanted to flip that to "do you understand what you turned in?" and make it something the whole class does together, not just the individual you're suspicious of. I call it Dubbel.

So I built a tool where:

1. Students upload their essay to your assignment
2. The app reads each submission and generates personalized quiz questions. Different for every student, based on their own writing (thesis choices, evidence, structure, content)
3. You launch a short timed session for the whole class. Everyone answers questions about their own work.

Because every student takes it, nobody is singled out. But if someone can't answer basic questions about their own paper, that's a clear signal, and it's a lot easier to have a conversation grounded in quiz results than a gut feeling. It also gives you documentation if things do need to escalate.

What I didn't expect is how engaging it is for both sides. Students end up reflecting on their own writing; explaining why they chose a piece of evidence, what they were trying to do with their structure, what their thesis actually means. It's basically commentary on their own thought process while they were writing. And for teachers, reading those responses is like getting a window into each student's thinking that you'd never get from the essay alone.

I've made it into a side-by-side experience: the essay and the student's own insights about it.

A few things worth noting:

• The app uses AI to generate the questions, so you'd need to be comfortable with that.
• You stay in control of how to interpret and act on results. It's a tool, not a verdict.
• Works for any written assignment: literary analysis, argumentative, research, creative writing.
• Requires an in-class proctor for the short timed portion to prevent recheating

I'm looking for a few teachers willing to try this out with a class so I can get honest feedback. If you're interested or have questions, comment or please message me! Join us at: dubbel.me

Our last post
You suspect a student didn't write their essay, so you have to pull them aside, ask them to explain their work, maybe escalate it. But even when you're right, the whole process feels adversarial. And if you're wrong, you've just damaged trust with that student.

The core problem is that most approaches to this start with "did you write this?" this puts you in detective mode. I wanted to flip that to "do you understand what you turned in?" and make it something the whole class does together, not just the individual you're suspicious of.

I posted in here a while back and it got a ton of interest from teachers. Since then, we've spent time building it and running a successful pilot in real classrooms. We understand a lot of educators have strong opinions on AI use in class, but the sheer amount of interest generated last post and our pilot tells us many of you would find a tool like this invaluable to have on your side.

So we built a tool where:

1. Students upload their essay/report/research paper to your assignment
2. The app reads each submission and generates personalized quiz questions. Different for every student, based on their own writing (thesis choices, evidence, structure, content)
3. You launch a short timed session for the whole class. Everyone answers questions about their own work.

Because every student takes it, nobody is singled out. But if someone can't answer basic questions about their own paper, that's a clear signal, and it's a lot easier to have a conversation grounded in quiz results than a gut feeling. It also gives you documentation if things do need to escalate. It’s the better, faster alternative to: Wondering how the words got on the page (ultimately unprovable), sacrificing entire days to in class pen and paper, relying on arbitrary AI detectors' percentages, or 1 on 1 student meetings.

What we didn't expect is how engaging it is for both sides. Students end up reflecting on their own writing; explaining why they chose a piece of evidence, what they were trying to do with their structure, what their thesis actually means. It's basically commentary on their own thought process while they were writing. And for teachers, reading those responses is like getting a window into each student's thinking that you'd never get from the essay alone.

We've made it into a side-by-side experience: the essay and the student's own insights about it. We call it Dubbel and can be found here. Dubbel is FERPA complaint.

A few things worth noting:

• The app uses AI to generate the questions, so you'd need to be comfortable with that.
• You stay in control of how to interpret and act on results. It's a tool, not a verdict.
• Works for any written assignment: literary analysis, argumentative, research, creative writing.
• Requires an in-class proctor for the short timed portion to prevent recheating

I'm looking for a few ELA teachers willing to join this beta so we can get honest feedback. If you have questions, comment or please message me! Join at: dubbel.me