At Mentafy, 2024 has been an exciting and pivotal year. Our mission is to support learners from the initial idea to the submission of academic work—using a process-based approach that ensures transparency in plagiarism, ghostwriting (contract cheating), and AI usage in writing.

As a provider of a software-as-a-service solution to promote academic integrity, we assisted nearly 100 educational institutions and their students in creating and evaluating academic work throughout 2024. We look forward to taking the necessary steps in the coming year to help even more schools and universities achieve their goals.

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What We Achieved in 2024

Over the past year, we have refined our writing project support and significantly improved our algorithm for analyzing the writing process. This allows us to create even more precise evidence-based reports that reveal which parts of a text were independently crafted and which originated from external sources.

One of the key insights we gained is that many educational institutions face challenges in integrating such process-based writing support from the start of a project. Instead, they often rely on “post-hoc” approaches, such as submitting completed documents to plagiarism detection software or using AI detection tools. (Why this falls short of addressing the problem, read here.)

A heavy-handed approach could involve full surveillance—using keyloggers or other proctoring tools to track and monitor every interaction with a text document. At Mentafy, we consciously take a different path: No surveillance, no keyloggers!
Our software analyzes differences between automatically saved text versions for unusual patterns, but during the evaluation, only the final submitted text is reviewed. Out of respect for privacy and data protection, early drafts and deleted content are not included in the reports.

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What’s Coming in 2025

To better address the challenges of integrating our tools into existing workflows, we’ve decided to expand our offerings. In 2025, Mentafy will introduce a solution for post-hoc analyses. This will allow us to extract valuable insights from metadata available after final submission, such as the Word .docx format or version histories from Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

While this approach doesn’t achieve the same level of granularity as a live process analysis, it still provides reliable evidence of original work and uncovers serious violations—even when the writing process wasn’t monitored from the beginning.

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Our Promise for 2025

We aim to make it easier for educational institutions to foster academic integrity without additional effort or an atmosphere of control. While reducing the workload for educators, Mentafy empowers learners to confidently and transparently certify their originality.

Thank you for trusting Mentafy. Together, we’re setting new standards for academic integrity and creating an environment where teaching and learning thrive in mutual respect.

Here’s to a successful 2025 with integrity!