Detecting AI-Authored Text in Authentic Student Writing: Evidence from PISA 2025

Abstract

AI-text detectors reach near-perfect scores in evaluations that contrast fully human-written texts with texts generated from researcher-designed prompts. In authentic student writing, however, AI use is voluntary and often partial. We study this setting with the PISA 2025 FLA dataset, in which 15-year-olds in Germany wrote English argumentative essays with and without access to a gpt-4o-mini-based chatbot. Keystroke, clipboard and chat logs let us trace every character of the final essay to its origin. From this provenance, we derive text- and sentence-level labels for human-written, AI-generated and mixed text, and for text written after chatbot use without traceable AI material. We evaluate a feature-based detector and a classifier on frozen Llama-3.1-8B embeddings, both adapted from top-ranked shared-task systems. Both separate AI from human text reliably (macro-F1 up to 0.96 for texts and 0.95 for sentences), independently of spelling errors. The feature-based detector, however, relies on lexical complexity, which a simple student-style rewriting prompt removes (AI recall 0.92 $\to$ 0.60 with gpt-4o-mini, 0.41 with Qwen3). The embedding-based detector stays robust for whole texts (AI recall $\ge$ 0.94) but not for single sentences (AI recall as low as 0.59). Mixed text falls between the two classes, and text without traceable AI material is classified as human-written in about 95\% of texts.