A student pasted from ChatGPT. Here is what to say.
You open the submission and you know. Maybe a replay shows a single paste. Maybe the process record shows an AI response that appears, word for word, as the student's paragraph. Maybe there is no record and it is just the voice. Whatever brought you here, you now have a conversation to have, and how you open it decides whether anything is learned.
Cognity was started by a former elementary school teacher, and one lesson from those years comes up often in our team: the conversations that go wrong are the ones that open with a conclusion. Here is a script built for the moment when you have evidence but want the conversation to be about learning.
Before the conversation
Decide what you actually know and what you are inferring. "This paragraph appeared as a single paste at 9:14 pm" is a fact. "You used ChatGPT" is an inference from it, usually a safe one, but still an inference. "You didn't do the work" is a judgment. Keep the three separate in your head, because the student will hear all three at once if you let them blur.
Then decide what the assignment's rules actually were. If your AI rules for the task said "you may use AI to brainstorm but the text must be yours," you are having a rules conversation. If the rules were unclear, you are having a norms conversation, and the student has a fair point if they say so.
Opening: describe, don't accuse
Start with what the record shows, in neutral words, and stop.
"I was reading your process record. At 9:14 this paragraph appears all at once, and it's very close to an AI response earlier in the log. Walk me through what happened there."
The sentence does three things. It shows you looked at their work, not a score. It names a specific moment, which is answerable, rather than a whole essay, which is only deniable. And it ends with a question that is easy to answer honestly and hard to answer dishonestly.
Five questions that lead somewhere
What were you trying to figure out when you asked the AI that? This treats the prompt as a thinking move, which it is. Most students who paste were stuck on something specific. Finding it is the whole point.
What did you keep, and what did you change? If the answer is "nothing," you have your answer and they have said it themselves. If they changed things, ask which and why. That is writing instruction happening in real time.
Which of these sentences would you defend as yours? Pick two sentences from the pasted paragraph. Ask them to explain the second one. A student who understands the argument can. A student who does not will stall, and the stall is more useful than any score because they felt it.
What did the assignment allow, and where did this cross it? Let them say it. If the rules were clear, this is where responsibility lands without you having to put it there. If the rules were not clear, this is where you learn that and fix the rules.
What would you do differently with the same deadline and the same AI? Not "without AI." Same tools, same pressure. You are teaching a practice, not enforcing an abstinence.
Closing: the consequence and the path
Whatever your school's policy requires, say it plainly and once. Then say what happens next that is about learning: a rewrite of the one paragraph in class, with the AI available under the rules, and a two-sentence process note attached. The consequence is small and specific. The learning is the larger part.
What not to do
Do not put a detector percentage on the table. It is not evidence, it is unreliable for non-native English writers, and the moment you say "87 percent" the conversation becomes about the number instead of the work.
Do not ask "did you use AI?" as the opening. It invites a denial, and a denial forces you to escalate. Describe the record and ask them to explain it.
Do not have this conversation without a record if you can avoid it. Voice and vocabulary are signals, not evidence, and the students most likely to trip them are the ones who read a lot or write in a second language.
Why the record changes the conversation
Every one of these questions assumes you can point to a moment: a prompt, a paste, a change. That is what a process record gives you. When students work with an AI inside a workspace that records the conversation, the record is there before anyone has to ask for it, and the teacher's question changes from "did you?" to "tell me about this." Cognity is built to produce that record, and to let the teacher set the rules the AI follows so the conversation starts from shared terms.
If you want to see what a record looks like with your own class, Cognity is free for individual teachers. Set a task, share the link, and read the first record when it comes in.