Software development

The first software is now developed and the testing of it is ongoing. The idea is based on my doctoral thesis as well as informal conversations with students at numerous universities in different countries in Africa, Europe and North America. The university students have told me numerous strategies they ally to manipulate texts they have not written themselves, in order to make them pass the plagiarism and text matching programs available on the market.

My software detects about 150 different manipulations in texts, for example test which students have handed in to their teachers for assessing and/or grading. Some examples of tests which might have been manipulated to pass through the market’s conventional plagiarism programs the last decade are the BA theses and Master theses. My software indicates whether the student has written the text in the thesis for their university degree on their own – or if it seems as though (parts of) the thesis have been fetched from others and thereafter have been manipulated to pass through the markets’ commonly used plagiarism programs.

The software user-friendly and addresses HR Departments, recruitment and staffing companies, as well as educational institutions in order to verify whether the applicants themselves have written their theses which are included in their university diplomas. If the job advert has not required that the applicants upload their theses it is often easy to download the theses from the universities digital archives. In Sweden theses can be downloaded from DiVA (https://www.diva-portal.org/), in Finland from e.g. https://ethesis.helsinki.fi/en, and https://abo.finna.fi/BrowseRecord/abo_electronic_aa.9912910733405972?lng=en-gb. (Master theses from e.g. Hanken have been available electronically since 2009.)

The purpose with this software is to provide new tools to detect misconduct and fraud and validate competence – in order to prevent making wrong recruitments. The software completes previous conventional text matching programs in higher education and provide a new powerful tool which facilitates to, early in a recruitment process, eliminate those applicants who have not written (much of) their theses themselves – in favour of those who have written their theses themselves and accordingly possess these competences. The software does not detect whether a texts is composed by AI, but detects more than a hundred kinds of manipulations the students have carried out themselves to prevent that they have not written the text themselves. This comprises texts downloaded from the internet, tests provided by their peers and texts generated by AI.

The development of two other software are ongoing. These can be used separately or combined together to achieve a digital overall solution for HR departments and recruitment companies in their quest to distinguish between applicants who have conducted their studies on their own and those who, over years, have outsourced their studies to others (comprising generative AI) and who thereby might lack basic requested skills. The first of these two software focuses on short recorded digital interviews with job seekers and can be used early in the recruitment processes. This could also be used for the recruitment of PhD students to verify whether they themselves have written the research plan they have provided.

Contact info@charlottaronn.se for more information.

Consulting services

My consulting services cover several fields:

• Compulsory school and upper secondary school. How teaching is organised to secure that the individual pupil gets the adequate grade in this digitalised world where pupils easily, through the use of e.g. smartphones, software such as Google classroom, and generative AI (such as chatGPT) can outsource their schoolwork to others without the teachers’ awareness.

• Universities and colleges: How for example teaching, course plans, examination forms, and policy documents can be developed to secure the validating of the students’ knowledge, abilities and grades.

• HR Departments, recruitment and staffing companies, and companies that need to secure the applicants with the most elevated knowledge and proficiencies are the ones who proceed in the recruitment process - not the ones who successfully over years have outsourced their studies to others. The aim is to give new insights and provide tools to prevent costly wrong recruitment.

• Municipalities; for example where politicians in various committees do not get adequate information from the municipal public servants. The concept “backstage” could also be applied in this context where there is space for the public servants to lack in transparency towards the decision making politicians in terms of selected pieces of information as well as of the management process itself. One example is how the public servants in the building permit department manage and write official correspondence with the politicians in the building permit committee.

Contact info@charlottaronn.se for more information. ​