MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY
-------***-------
SUBJECT: ENG1OO
RESEARCH TITLE: Writing assistant tools
(Grammarly and Quillbot) and their impact on
the quality of AEP students' assignment
CLASS: Advanced Finance 63B
GROUP MEMBERS:
Dinh Diem Hang
Nguyen Thai
Pham Thuy Anh
Ta Huu Hung
Tran Hoang Thai An
LECTURER: Pham Phuong Lan
Hanoi, 2022
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. 3
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 4
1.
Background of the research .............................................................................................. 4
2.
Rationale ............................................................................................................................. 4
3.
Purposes of the research .................................................................................................... 5
4.
Research questions ............................................................................................................. 5
5.
Scope of the research ......................................................................................................... 5
6.
Research methods .............................................................................................................. 5
7.
Structure of the research ................................................................................................... 6
CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................. 6
1.
Overview of writing assistant tools: ................................................................................. 6
2.
Overview of the applications ( Grammarly and Quillbot): ............................................ 7
3.
Overview of AEP students: ............................................................................................. 10
CHAPTER III: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .................................................................... 11
1.
2.
3.
The usage habit of AEP students .................................................................................... 11
1.1.
Analyzing the information of the students taking part in the survey .......................... 11
1.2.
The way of approaching writing support applications ............................................... 12
1.3.
Students’ frequency of using writing assistant tools .................................................. 14
1.4.
The participants' purpose for using these apps .......................................................... 16
1.5.
AEP students’ budget for writing aids upgrades ........................................................ 18
The impacts of writing aids on the study results of AEP’s students ........................... 23
2.1.
AEP students’experiences when using these application ........................................... 23
2.2.
AEP students’experiences when not using these application ..................................... 35
Some effective solutions for these issues ........................................................................ 40
3.1.
For student .................................................................................................................. 40
3.2.
For Grammarly and Quillbot ..................................................................................... 42
2
3.3.
For AEP ...................................................................................................................... 42
CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 43
1.
About the usage habit of AEP students of using these application ............................. 43
2.
About the impacts of writing aids on the study results of AEP’s students ................. 44
3.
About some effective solutions ........................................................................................ 44
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 46
TABLE OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Students Scores Not Using Support App ........................................................... 26
3
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
1. Background of the research
Along with technology development, Covid 19 has set a favorable condition for the
educational applications to thrive like never before since students have become
acclimated to online study as a daily habit. Many software manufacturers have created
learning support applications to help people to study more effortlessly and more
efficiently. And the most popular with today's university students is the writing assistant
tools, a double-edged sword that we all have to take caution.
On the one hand, writing assistant tools are designed to detect grammatical errors and
writing mistakes in many cases, then offer proper changes. Some of the commonly
known faults might contain sentence structure, plagiarism, or overusing words,... With
the power of digital tools, students’ writing skills will be enhanced a lot.
On the other hand, there have been some notable overdependence on these applications
among pupils and the results might vary. One of the most serious consequences of
abusing supporting tools is lessening the student’s creativity in the long term. And even
further, this might lead to the redundancy of acquiring real knowledge as the tools have
taken over everything.
In this research, we made it our responsibility to thoroughly analyze this issue about
the writing assistant tools. Therefore, drawing conclusions about the usage and
influence of students, especially those of intake 63 in AEP.
2. Rationale
In the world context of developing technology, more and more applications are created
with the aim to assist human activities. And precisely, in education, tools such as
Grammarly or Paraphrasing-tool are springing up over every platform, helping students'
work become effortless. However, we have noticed some situations of overusing them,
4
for instance, using tools to paraphrase the whole article to avoid plagiarism. Therefore,
we are motivated to find out the genuine reasons behind it and whether these tools are
appropriate for students or not.
3. Purposes of the research
Initially, research is conducted to show attitudes and behaviors, specifically the degree
of dependence of AEP students on writing support applications. Based on the data
collected from reliable information sources surveyed by the students, we wish to
provide insight into the students' usage habits of these applications in general, then go
particularly into three separate apps: Grammarly, Quillbot, and Plagiarism Detector.
We portray several positive and negative effects of using them. Finally, our goal is to
give suggestions and recommendations on using learning support applications in the
most optimal and useful way for AEP students, thereby helping them achieve the actual
purposes of application builders when launching the apps and preventing the original
purposes from being misdirected.
4. Research questions
- What are the usage habits of the four intakes of AEP students of using writing
support applications?
- What are the impacts of writing aids on the study results of AEP’s students?
- What are the effective solutions to this issue for AEP’s students?
5. Scope of the research
The scope of the study will focus primarily on students from the four intakes of AEP,
including freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior, with approximately 200 students
surveyed. Because in the face of the complicated development of the COVID-19
pandemic, online learning has become a necessary condition to protect students from
the risk of infection, creating favorable conditions for students to access support
applications learning aid. Moreover, these applications have become widespread
among students who have gone through the online learning process. This provides the
opportunity for a survey to be conducted smoothly with a diverse source of information
from the real-life experiences of AEP students. This research will be conducted within
15 weeks.
6. Research methods
To better understand how writing assistant tools affect the quality of AEP students’
assignments, we use the following research methods. We will survey 200 students from
the four intakes of AEP, including freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. The survey
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will be both in the form of online and offline questionnaires. The participants will
choose one or more from the available choices and answer some short questions to show
their opinions. In addition, we will also interview some targeted students to get the most
objective view of this research. Moreover, we also use pieces of information on the
Internet and some other reliable references.
7. Structure of the research
This research consists of five main parts: Introduction, Literature Review, Research
Methodology, Findings and Discussion, and Conclusion. The first chapter will provide
the research’s background explaining its context, rationale, purposes, research
questions, scope of the research, research methods, and structure. Chapter II, a.k.a.
Literature Review, offers more information from reputable and trustworthy experts’
publications, thereby providing readers with further understanding and multidimensional views on the topic of the research paper. The third section of Research
Methodology includes detailed methodology and special materials used to conduct this
research. Then, the final results and findings will be highlighted and summarized in
chapter IV before being analyzed and discussed; several implications of the findings
may be included. Finally, all the aforementioned issues will be summed up in the last
chapter: Conclusion.
CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Overview of writing assistant tools:
Along with technology development, Covid 19 has set a favorable condition for
educational applications to thrive like never before since students have become
acclimated to online study as a daily habit. Many software manufacturers have created
learning support applications to help people to study more effortlessly and more
efficiently. And the most popular with today's university students is the writing assistant
tools.
A writing assistant is a software program that uses artificial intelligence technology to
help writers with the creative process. This can include everything from offering a
grammar checker to assisting with the nuances of the language to make the writing
more engaging. With the development of technology, these tools can help with that by
detecting all the tones present in users’ writing, showing them the most effective
sentences in work, and helping them edit the others to use the same tone. Besides, if
students often use it, they can achieve better marks in their exams, feel more confident
6
and their vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and punctuation will also improve. However,
we have noticed some situations of overusing them, for instance, using tools to
paraphrase the whole article to avoid plagiarism. Therefore, we are motivated to find
out the genuine reasons behind it and whether these tools are appropriate for students
or not.
2. Overview of the applications (Grammarly and Quillbot):
“Grammarly is a writing assistant tool that students, writers, and other
professionals can use to enhance the writing quality of their documents. It checks for
more than 250 types of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, and it enhances
vocabulary usage” (Alison Doyle). Grammarly was founded in July 2009 by Alex
Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider and has developed significantly since its
initial release. The company's first software program was released as a paid subscription
product and an online editor. Grammarly aims to build a comprehensive, AI-based
communication assistant that helps people connect with and understand one another.
Their mission was to help students with their writing, helping people learn the basic
building blocks of the English language. Grammarly eventually developed to include a
browser extension for correcting basic spelling and grammar errors. Grammarly has
expanded its capabilities in recent years as a paid program, offering services on many
multiple operating systems. Since its first release, Grammarly has expanded to include
Windows, IOS, Linux, Android, and World Wide Web operating systems such as
Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. It has emerged as one of the industry's leaders in
automated grammar, plagiarism, spelling, and stylistic software programs with 30
million daily active users in 2020. The features of Grammarly are extremely diverse.
Grammarly began as a paid subscription; however, there is now a free version and a
premium version that the users can choose based on their needs and budget. To be more
specific, the Free version provides basic writing suggestions on spelling, grammar,
punctuation, and conciseness. Grammarly Premium includes all of the features listed
above with several additional benefits. The Premium version offers automatic sentence
rewrites, assistance with vocabulary suggestions, and an automated plagiarism checker.
The plagiarism detection program automatically checks the internet for anything that
resembles the work being written. Then, the overall assignment is given a percentage
value that corresponds to the amount of work that closely resembles other pages found
on the internet. That way, writers can correct these issues before they get penalized for
plagiarism on publication.
Quillbot is a paraphrasing and summarizing tool that helps cut users’ writing time
by using state-of-the-art AI to rewrite any sentence, paragraph, or article. It’s been
7
established in 2017 by Rohit Gupta, Anil Jason, and David Silin, three computer science
students, amassing over 50 million users worldwide since then. “Our vision for QuillBot
has always been to make writing easier so that people can spend more time focusing
on what they should write instead of how they should write it,” said Rohan Gupta, Cofounder, and CEO of QuillBot. The tool's goal is to rewrite material by altering the
structure of sentences and replacing words with synonyms while maintaining the
original content's meaning. This application has been trusted to help students, writers,
bloggers, teaching staff, and so on (Chapelle & Sauro, 2019). In the free version,
QuillBot allows a limit of up to 400 characters that can be paraphrased. Like
Grammarly, this tool consists of two versions, called free and premium. The benefit of
this tool is that it is time-efficient, and can paraphrase quickly sentences in English. In
the premium version, this tool allows you to increase the maximum character limit to
10,000 characters. QuillBot has seven helpful features, including Standard Mode,
which serves to balance changes to the text that you input by keeping it from changing
the actual meaning of the text and making it look more original; Fluency Mode, which
is a feature that focuses on making text look natural by using correct and proper
grammar in English. This feature makes only minor changes to the text, the original
meaning of the text will be retained well; Creativity Mode, which focuses on changing
as much as possible in the inputted text. However, this may change the meaning or
overall coherence of the results. This mode can be very effective if your text wants to
look very different from the original text; Creative+ Mode, which is used to make
changes that are more intuitive and more grammatical in-depth, such as common
phrases or sayings; Formal Mode is a mode that alters the text to make it sound more
appropriate for a formal audience. This mode is great if you are writing in an academic
or business context; Shorten Mode, serves to shorten the text as much as possible while
maintaining its meaning in it. Shorten mode is especially useful if you are trying to have
the reduction of the total word count or the overall size of the text, and Expand Mode,
in contrast, serves to try to increase the length of the text by adding more suitable words
if possible. If you want to increase your overall word count, this feature is especially
beneficial. QuillBot free users can have access to only Standard and Fluency modes.
Meanwhile, Creative, Creative+, Shorten, Expand, and Formal modes are only
available for the premium version.
From those introductions, we know that Quillbot and Grammarly are advanced
grammar checkers that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect errors,
eliminate unnecessary words, and improve clarity. Quillbot and Grammar both offer
free versions which are useful if you want to try them without spending money, but the
features are limited. You can use Quillbot for free by visiting the official Quillbot
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website or by clicking www.quillbot.com. Quillbot is completely free, with no hidden
fees or limited-time free trials. However, certain Quillbot features are restricted because
you must pay for the premium version. Quillbot Free allows users to paraphrase 150
words with two writing modes only. Like Quillbot, Grammarly also offers a free
standard version with no hidden charges. Grammarly Free can be used in Microsoft
Word, Google Docs, or Chrome Extension. Even the official Grammarly website lets
you proofread your content in a few minutes.
In Quillbot Premium, you can use all the additional features like a summarizer tool,
freeze words, compare different modes side by side, and paraphrase unlimited words.
With Quillbot’s premium version, you can choose between three plans: 1) A monthly
plan costs $4.95 per month; 2) The semi-annual plan costs $24.96 for six months; 3)
An annual plan costs $39.95 per year. The Grammarly Premium version offers
automatic sentence rewrites, assistance with vocabulary suggestions, and an automated
plagiarism checker.
Grammarly Premium is categorized into different subscription modules: 1) The
monthly plan costs $29.95 per month; 2) A quarterly subscription costs $59.95, which
is billed every three months; 3) An annual subscription costs $139 per year.
Quillbot is clearly the more affordable option. However, Grammarly provides advanced
grammar checking that Quillbot can’t match. About Grammar Checker, in our tests,
both tools detected more grammar errors and problems than a basic grammar checker
in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. However, Grammarly excels because it provides
context to these mistakes. Grammarly can detect and correct grammar errors with a
single click, and it can even improve sentence structure. That is entirely due to its AIpowered writing assistant. About paraphrasing, Quillbot excels at rewriting existing
content. When paraphrasing text, you can choose from several modes. Select the formal
mode if you want your text to be more formal. These options are also available if you
want to shorten or expand text. The modes of Quillbot allow you to paraphrase text to
your liking. It also includes a hand article or essay summarizer, which is useful for
writing abstracts. Grammarly does not offer anything like this. About Plagiarism
Checker, Quillbot contains a great plagiarism checker. Grammarly is superior for
checking academic papers and essays. It is, however, unsuitable for freelance writers
and content publishers. This is due to the fact that it operates on a per-page basis. It
costs $7.50 to check 20 pages with an average of 250 words per page. So, if you check
a lot of articles, it may become costly. Grammarly's plagiarism checker is included for
free with the premium subscription. About Ease of Use, compared to other paraphrases
and proofreading tools like Wordtune and Ginger, Quillbot and Grammarly are the
9
easiest to use. Signing up takes a few seconds, and once done, you'll receive a tutorial
on how to use the software. Both tools have Google Chrome extensions that allow you
to check your work while writing. Grammarly, on the other hand, allows you to accept
its suggestions with a single mouse click via the app and add-on. In conclusion,
although Quillbot and Grammarly cannot replace a human editor, both tools can help
the users with the writing process. Quillbot is the least expensive of the two (compared
to Grammarly Premium), but it has fewer features. Quillbot is a good option if you
repurpose content, are an academic, or require a low-cost writing assistant. It's also a
good option for paraphrasing longer texts. Meanwhile, Grammarly Premium is more
expensive. Use this tool if you require advanced artificial intelligence to edit your work
and detect plagiarism. It's also a good option if you collaborate with other writers and
want to double-check their work for plagiarism or missing citations. I also like the free
version, despite the fact that its reports are limited.
The number of tools user
18,30%
81,70%
I have
I haven't
In order to clarify the popularity of the writing assistant tools among students today,
our team has conducted a survey on the number of AEP students who have used those
tools. And the result shows that the majority of those surveyed have used the writing
assistant tools such as Grammarly and Quillbot. This proportion accounted for 81.70%,
which is much higher compared to the figures for those who have not used the writing
assistant tools before. Based on this result, we can conclude that writing assistant tools
are very popular nowadays; people tend to use digital agencies to upgrade their learning
quality.
3. Overview of AEP students:
Center for Advanced Educational Programs (AEP) was founded in 2006 with the
mission of bringing a more modern, effective learning environment to students.
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Students are trained towards comprehensive development, not only are they provided
in-depth knowledge about their major, but they also enhance their soft skills via
orientation courses. The AEP curriculum is student-centered, enhances student progress
and success, and prepares them for inclusion within the global community. The AEP
system wants to emphasize academic excellence and see student development as future
leaders and also harden students to serve their community.
With 10 years of experience in education and training, AEP has been maintaining 4
major programs, including an advanced program with 100% English teaching method,
a high-quality program, and POHE programs with 30% of the whole course being
taught in English, American Bachelor Degree program and many student exchange
projects in summer in the US. The AEP’s trained bachelors will acquire the
fundamental knowledge, be as systematic and modern as the advanced programs in the
world; gain the ability to analyze studying, determining policies, and solving specific
issues; especially be able to use English in communication and work fluently with an
output requirement of 6.5 IELTS Score.
CHAPTER III: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
1. The usage habit of AEP students
1.1.
Analyzing the information of the students taking part in the survey
Genders of the respondants
9,40%
34,50%
56,20%
Male
Female
11
I'd rather not to say
School intakes of the surveyed
students
8,10%
14%
54,90%
23%
K60
K61
K62
K63
With 235 answers from the survey, females accounted for the highest proportion, at
56.2%. The figures for males and people who don’t want to reveal their gender were
lower, at 34.5% and 9.4% respectively. From that data, we can see that women tend to
use writing assistant tools more than men. We think the reason is that females tend to
have more office work like PowerPoint, photoshop, writing articles, novels,… while
men tend to go outside with works that require more strength and technics. Besides, to
get more specific data about the participants in the survey, our group asked for
information about the academic year of everyone who participated in the survey. And
the results show that K63 constituted 54.9% of the total students. K62 had just under
25%, and the students of K61 and K60 were a little bit less, with the figures amounting
to 14% and 8% respectively. From that data, we can see that K63 accounts for the most
percentage of the students surveyed. The reason why this happens is that writing
assistant tools like Grammarly and Quillbot have just become popular in Vietnam for
just about 2 years, therefore, K60 and K61 may not know much about the tools.
Moreover, National Economics University has several changes in its teaching methods
such as using Turnitin, or using new Websites… so K62 and K63 have to learn to use
new assistant tools to keep up with the changes.
1.2.
The way of approaching writing support applications
In order to be able to assess students' usage habits when studying in an English
environment, which could be a mandatory element when accessing the curriculum for
each study program, we have conducted a survey on how students reached and learned
about these 2 apps. In general, the majority of survey respondents knew about these
writing aids through marketing campaigns on online platforms such as Facebook,
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Instagram, or TikTok, and the least number of students knew about them through
YouTube.
The user's approach to apps
Others
0
YouTube
1
By searching
74
Advertisements
127
My teachers
28
My friends
94
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
With the development of the internet and mass media, more than 66.1% of students
have known through the advertising campaigns of Grammarly and Quillbot and 38,5%
have known by searching. Social media has become mandatory for each brand that
wishes to get in front of its targeted audience, in 2021 becoming the top channel utilized
in marketing. Acknowledging it, Grammarly and Quillbot jumped in and launched
accounts on all the major social platforms to reach the maximum number of potential
customers, especially students, who have the requirement to use these applications the
most. The most surprising data is the number of students through YouTube who knows
about these applications is merely 0.5%, corresponding to 1 student out of 192 answers
collected, even though these two applications have boosted their appearance on this
viewing platform.
In order to reach more than 75M total visits web per month, besides its incredible SEO
strategy, Grammarly has likewise gone to quite possibly the most effective approach to
acquiring brand mindfulness - having a simple to-perceive social media presence.
Especially in the 2019-2020 period when remote learning and working become a
requirement and leisure activities must be done at home, Grammarly has launched its
TikTok account at the best timing possible - during the COVID19 pandemic to ensure
brands don't miss out on any trends with posts that are both informative and humorous.
Thanks to catching up with that trend, Tiktok has brought Grammarly an additional
78.3K followers as of May 2022 and received more than 620K likes for interesting
videos when integrating tips with hot songs, successful public attention for young
people, especially with genZ. Both brands' Facebook accounts are focused on providing
more practical tips that can instantly engage the user's writing process. With popular
13
coverage on most social platforms thanks to trending humorous media campaigns, it's
understandable to realize why the number of students knowing about these 2 apps is the
highest instead of YouTube with traditional media campaigns.
Besides, the source of information from the experiences of friends and teachers is quite
prestigious when more than 94 students said they were introduced by friends and 28
students were shared by teachers. When our group surveyed 2 teachers about their
recommendations for writing aids for students, Teacher A commented: "Grammarly is
a tool that provides grammar feedback to the writer. That is a large part of what I do
when reviewing a student’s paper. the student would use a tool to make the corrections
on his own rather than leave them for me to suggest for him to make later marks" and
teacher B said: "I wish more of my students would use Quillbot, they can take advantage
of free or low-cost tools that could make it easy for them to improve their writing." The
reason the application has become so popular and recommended by both teachers and
students is probably because they fully meet the needs of both students – layman and
teachers, professionals with formal and academic writers with different version to use.
Some may say that Grammarly and Quillbot make corrections, so the student does not
have to learn how to make them. However, according to the teachers' comments and
suggestions about these applications, the process of identifying an error, recognizing
the corrections, and choosing it sometimes is the process of learning and the survey
numbers say it all.
In conclusion, thanks to “ “near human” touch by offering tips, suggestions, and advice”
(Brendan, 2021) it provided, attractive advertisements with trending videos in the media
and the trust of teachers and students, AEP students can increasingly easily access these
support tools.
Some may say that Grammarly and Quillbot make corrections, so the student does not
have to learn how to make them. However, according to the teachers' comments and
suggestions about these applications, the process of identifying an error, recognizing
the corrections, and choosing it sometimes is the process of learning and the survey
numbers say it all.
1.3.
Students’ frequency of using writing assistant tools
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Students' frequency of using writing assistant tools
14%
Rarely (<3 times/month)
27%
Sometimes (oncetwice/week)
18%
Often (3-5 times/week)
Usually (>5 times/week)
41%
Out of the 235 respondents, 192 admitted to having used the tools at least once before.
The diagram indicates the frequency of them using writing assistant tools such as
Grammarly and Quillbot for a certain period of time.
As can be clearly seen, most of them (79 students, which is equivalent to 41,1%) only
use these applications once or twice a week. And the percentage of people who rarely
use these (less than three times per month) ranks second with 27,1% (52 students).
As the frequency goes up, the percentage goes down. It seems that most students solely
use writing assistant tools when they have assignments or reports, as the percentage of
those using tools more than five times a week only takes up to 13,5% (26 students); and
the percentage of those using tools more often is among the average with 35 people's
votes (18%). This is not so surprising as writing assistant tools are, in fact, practical and
efficient for students' lives.
Students with a high commitment to writing assistant tools might be associated with
more academic work, such as a part-time translator or English tutor. Previously in the
survey, out of the four intakes, the number of intake 63 that filled out this form is
prominently dominant (129 out of 236); and as the curriculum selected for first-year
students is pure General Subjects (largely given in Vietnamese); therefore the outcome
of this questionnaire (Student's frequency of using writing assistant tools) is not very
impressive, but understandable.
To conclude, companies should try to integrate more functions and upgrade the inherent
service to bring these tools to student’s lives more day by day.
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1.4.
The participants' purpose for using these apps
The participants' purpose for using these apps
Doing English exercises
1
Improving writing skills
109
Conducting scientific researches
57
Writing reports
113
Writing mails
62
Assignments
150
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
To be able to find out the AEP students' usage habits of these apps, my team asked
participants about their intended use and obtained the bar graph above.
Overall, 78.1% of students surveyed (150 out of 192) said that essay writing is the
reason why most of them look to the above applications to facilitate their writing
process smoothly, and only one student uses these applications to assist in doing
English exercises. At this stage of the academy, scattered exercises seem to be rare,
unlike high school work.
Writing reports and further developing writing abilities are supposed to be famous
objectives for AEP students to utilize this application on account of the diverse support
that helps them complete assignments more quickly and writing expertise advancement
becomes more straightforward. This has been clearly demonstrated with the statistical
figures of 58.9%, respectively, corresponding to 113 students used for writing reports
and 56.8% or 109 students who have used the application to improve their skills.
"Report" is a completely new concept for intake 63 (freshmen), so the need for AI
support is completely reasonable.
Sixty-two participants said they frequently utilize these applications for their email
writing process to check for grammar and spelling errors. Interestingly, more and more
youngsters are devoting themselves to professional environments other than university
or college, as an intern perhaps. This has led to a higher percentage of students paying
attention to little details, such as spelling and grammar errors or attitude problems
(which Grammarly can solve in less than a minute).
Finally, nearly a third of students chose these apps as a support for their scientific
research. Those who aim for scholarship usually have the tendency to conduct scientific
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research. Good academic experience might be a great springboard for their career later
in life. In conclusion, Grammarly and Quillbot are surely versatile applications that
could cover nearly all of student’s academic aspects. On the other hand, this might
sound the alarm about student’s reliance on AI assistance.
On the other hand, we do understand that not everyone is accessible to these AI
supports, therefore we asked the respondents their particular reasons behind this.
The reasons why AEP students have not used the writing
assistant tools
Others
These apps are over my budget
These apps don’t support the languages…
I don’t think these apps can fully deliver…
I don’t think they are necessary for me
I haven’t known about these apps yet
0
1
11
4
20
16
19
5
10
15
20
25
Our team received 46 answers to the question of why students do not use writing
assistant tools such as Grammarly and Quillbot, and 41,3% of them were “I haven’t
known about these apps yet.” These statistics have shown that the two companies
should do a better marketing strategy to reach out for more and try to select out the
main target (students/ lecturers/ officers/...) for a better result.
Nearly half of the surveyed students thought that these two apps could not fully describe
their ideas, while 16 others believed that they were just simply unnecessary. This is one
of the most predictable reasons since some of the writing assistants don’t do as well as
expected. Quillbot can support paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism, but they don’t ensure
the outcome meaning of it. The text’s original purpose might be completely misdirected
due to the suggested options. We have noticed some situations where students overuse
it and submitted an absurd, meaningless document with low plagiarism. However,
students with the answer “not necessary” might be really confident with their writing
skills and have a great grammar base; or they just primarily use their English in daily
communication/ casual environment, so no AI support was needed.
Pricing was also noticed as one of the major problems, approximately a quarter of the
received responses were “These apps are over my budget”. If we do the math, about
17
400,000 VND per year is not so much of a big deal for a university student, but the
concept of paying all that at once might be an obstacle on their way to purchasing.
Another reason was the two apps did not support the language the students were writing,
however, only 8,7% of the asked students experienced this inconvenience. English is
the international language, so it is essential that companies only focus on this. It can be
a problem if a student is exploring things in a third language such as French or Italian,
etc.
Different from high school, students from the AEP are participating in a brand new
environment, English environment. Some students' English base is not really well-built,
so their priority in AI support is usually for translation, which these two applications
don't support, Google translate in another way is more suitable for them.
All in all, it is a real challenge for the app-builders to advance their products and
broaden their brands for further achievements.
1.5.
AEP students’ budget for writing aids upgrades
Our team conducted a survey to find out about the ability and affordability of AEP
students for writing aids. Questions were raised both for those who have been and are
experiencing the two applications; and for the rest, we provide brief information about
the apps along with the features of the free and premium versions so that they can have
better comparison and give the most accurate answers.
First, we asked three questions to those who have been using two applications
Grammarly and Quillbot. With the first question, “Which version are you using?”, the
results came out in line with the group’s initial prediction that the free version was being
used by most of the students who took part in the survey.
18
The version used by users
15,60%
84,40%
The free version
The premium version
In view of the gathered overview information, the pie diagram shows that with 192
students taking an interest in the review, the quantity of participants utilizing the free
version represents the greater part with 84.4% relating to 162 students. Meanwhile, just
30 of the surveyed AEP students said they experienced the premium version.
Asking the follow-up question, we wanted to find out about AEP students’ spending
budget for Grammarly and Quillbot per month. We offer four levels of payment in turn,
including less than 100,000 VND, from 100,000 VND to 300,000 VND, from 300,000
VND to 500,000 VND, and more than 500,000 VND; in addition, an option for
respondents who use the basic version had also been added, meaning they did not pay
any money for the mentioned writing aids.
0,50%
6,30%
Students' budget for the tools
1%
I am using the free version
10,90%
Under 100,000 VND
100,000 VND - 300,000
VND
81,30%
300,000 VND - 500,000
VND
Over 500,000 VND
The results, respectively, were that 21 students said they had paid less than 100,000
VND, and 12 students spent from 100,000 VND to 300,000 VND for a better
19
experience. Only 3 students said that they paid the highest cost, more than 300,000
VND to use the most optimal support tools from the above applications. Even though
the number of students willing to pay for these applications is already small (only 36 of
the 192 respondents), most of these people only set a budget of 100,000 VND per month
for the apps.
After recognizing the experiences of students who have used the app, we conducted a
survey on students’ willingness to pay for the upgraded version. According to our initial
prediction, the majority of answers would still be saying that they were satisfied with
the free version and would continue using it; however, the number of students having
the opposite answer was slightly more than that predicted.
Students' willingness to subscribe to
premium version
I am satisfied with
the version I'm using
now
I want to upgrade to
the premium version
9%
23%
68%
I have not made up
my mind yet
As can be clearly seen, the number of students who think that they are satisfied with
the current version accounts for the majority with 67.7%. 22.9% corresponding to 44
students said that they are willing to pay a fee to upgrade the application’s support to
better suit their intended use and the remaining 9.4% think that they have not had a
decision yet and still wondering.
These results are not too difficult to understand, considering that the people surveyed
are all students and most are not financially independent and have no or very low
income. The majority of students still receive support from parents, and this amount of
money is only enough to pay for their basic needs such as shelter, food, clothes... The
money earned from a part-time job, or a freelance job is usually not too much (about
less than 5 million VND/month) and there are probably many other expenses that are
considered more necessary for students.
20
But this is not the only reason. Our team believes that another reason that can be
mentioned is that the paid services and purchasing habits for these services are not really
widespread in Vietnam. People are used to using utility software without paying fees
since there are cracked versions of almost every application available on the Internet.
(Crack is a program used to crack copyrighted software so that users can use all the
functions of that software without having to pay a license fee.) A study has shown the
difference in customers’ perception about paying for applications in Finland and
Vietnam: “In the mature market (Finland), the Premium version of freemium service
Spotify has become basic and standard, therefore, the perceived cost was only money
and there was no aesthetic value found. People chose Premium mainly because of its
functionally convenience rather than to imply some positive meaning about themselves
through the purchasing decision. On the other hand, in the emerging market (Vietnam),
Premium version was perceived as the more sophisticated luxury version. The
perceived cost was not only money but also the willingness to pay for the better version
of the service. Aesthetic value was found, as using Premium was perceived as
transferring positive messages related to their financial status, lifestyle and music
taste.” (Khong, 2019)
We can also take a look at another, simpler reason: the free versions of the two
applications above are enough to meet the needs of users. Therefore, they do not see
the need to pay to upgrade to the premium version. The premium version features are
not appealing enough for the participants, or they only use these applications with low
frequency, so it is a waste for them to spend money on Grammarly and Quillbot.
Now, let’s try approaching from another direction: With the above reasons, why are
there still students willing to spend a lot of money to pay for the premium version? Of
course, we will not take into account the financial factor of that individual student,
because that is already an understandable reason. When researching this issue, we came
across a study saying as follows: “… a growing industry practice in the freemium
pricing in which, when designing the free version, firms and product managers aim to
deliberately disappoint the consumer by including hidden shortcomings in it (but in a
way that can be discovered only after he has experienced it) in order to make him locked
in or “hooked” to the premium version.” This study also stated: “While offering the
free version helps expand the product’s consumer base, the factor that is the key in
selling the product and increasing the firm’s profit is that, once consumers use the free
version, they emotionally value it more and find losing it painful. Thus, when it is time
to pay (either to keep the product or to expand its current service), they often pay to
avoid the pain (Psychguides 2015). This anomaly arises because, when purchasing a
21
freemium product, consumers exhibit loss-averse preferences (Brustein 2013)—that is,
they feel losses more strongly than equally sized gains.” (Sami Najafi-Asadolahi, Andy
Tsay, Sajjad Najaf, Nishant Mishra, 2018) Students who are using the paid version must
have been somewhat influenced by this concept, and we also believe that they have
experienced the free version carefully enough to decide to upgrade.
Meanwhile, the same question is asked to the students who have not used the two
writing assistant tools at all. However, instead of asking about how much they were
paying then, we changed the question to revolve around willingness, since respondents
in this block have never experienced the applications in question.
The amount of money that participants are willing
to pay for the writing aids
2% 0%
Under 100,000 VND
24%
100,000 - 300,000 VND
300,000 - 500,000 VND
Over 500,000 VND
74%
We have aggregated the data into a pie chart in order to analyze it easily. From the pie
chart, it is clear that almost all students are willing to pay under 100,000 VND for those
tools. In contrast, only about 25% of the students are eager to pay more than 100,000
VND. We can conclude that students tend to choose beneficial tools that have a
reasonable price.
Surprisingly, students who have never used Grammarly and Quillbot, after being
introduced to these two applications, are willing to pay with a higher budget than
students who have been experiencing these writing assistant tools with a quarter of the
respondents saying that they are willing to pay over 100,000 VND per month. This
leads us to ask: are users of the free version fully aware of the features of the paid
version? Or is it because non-users have not yet gotten the idea of how good the
available utilities of the free version are? Or maybe the developer is just doing an
excellent job of describing and listing the features of the two versions in order to elicit
FOMO psychology and boost the purchasing potential of consumers? However, one
22
thing remains the same, most will not spend more than 100,000 VND for an application,
a learning aid. The reasons have been outlined above, and for these reasons, we believe
that these figures can be shifted in the future, with factors that are changing every day.
2. The impacts of writing aids on the study results of AEP’s students
2.1.
AEP students’ experiences when using these application
2.1.1. Reactions before and during using:
In this part of the survey, we asked the respondents to evaluate their experience with
the tools on a scale from 1 to 5 (totally disagree to totally agree). The overall statistic is
rather promising.
The tools' interface accessibility
50
46
45
40
35
30
24
25
19
20
15
10
5
3
3
1
2
0
3
4
5
First and foremost, we had two assertions relevant to the overall operation of the tools:
“The interface is easy to look at and to operate on” and “I have struggled using these
tools”. There were approximately 40 students who kept a neutral status in each
assertion. Up to 70% of the respondents find these applications friendly and appropriate
enough for them to use, and less than 30 students were recorded to have difficulty
conducting work on such platforms.
Grammarly is amazingly simple to utilize, principally because of its similarity through
the Browser Extension/Add-on, it automatically finds issues in the student’s text.
Besides, its other item shapes, the Online Editor (Web App), Desktop Application, MS
Word/Outlook Add-in, and the Grammarly Keyboard for iOS/Android, make it
available all over. Student just have to click “Add Grammarly” button to become
23
activate automatically. It is useful not only for student but also for the elder to check
their grammar from the first use because of their east-to-operate interface. In a blog
post about student’s experiences about using grammarly, a student shared that, although
the features the app provides are advanced and seem complicated, the interface and user
experience are quite easy and convenient to use. Another student even said it took them
only 30 minutes to show their grandparents - former writers how to use them.
As the same with Grammarly, users of Quillbot also have a pretty good experience
using the app. “Using Quillbot is a butter-like smooth experience. You literally have to
copy-and-paste the content and click a button.” (Harris, 2022) But with Quillbot,
students have to login to their website because Quillbot does not provide the application
on iOS or Android. To use these tools, users must access through browser extension,
MS Word and Google Docs. Besides, although the utilities that Quillbot brings are
richer and more diverse than Grammarly when providing users with most of the tools
for editing such as paraphrase, plagiarism, summarize or citation, which make the
difference between Quillbot and other support tools, but it is also the reason why the
interface of Quillbot is quite confusing because the information is overloaded for the
student at first glance. This also hinders students in the process of finding and editing
their essay.
In conclusion, (Nova, Lukmana, 2018) has commented that “the use of automated
writing evaluation program in detecting error seems giving some benefits for the user.
However, the application of this program still needs the teacher and lecturer’s
supervision to reduce the weaknesses of the program in detecting the errors”.
Subsequently, Grammarly and Quillbot is a valuable device that further develops
students writing quality, but it can't supplant human as the best checker.
Next, we continuously added assertions about how the tools are helping students.
“These tools save me more time on writing”, “The suggestions are proper and optimal”,
“The paraphrased graph is fluent”, “The time waiting for suggestions is not long”, “The
later paragraph has been optimized and has no grammar errors”, “The paragraph after
the adjustment can still deliver my original idea”. The indicators received were really
optimistic, “agree” and “totally agree” were substantially dominant out of all the
judgments. The opposite opinions only take up less than 10% of the total answers
collected.
24
Respondents' rate of agreement
60
52
50
45
45
43
40
39
40
34
28
30
28
23
18
20
22
26
23
16
16
16
11
8
10
3
1
3
1
7
6
4
2
3
2
5
0
Time-saving
Tools' suggestion
Completely disagree
Waiting time
Disagree
Fluency
Neutral
Agree
Optimized
grammar
Original idea
unchanged
Completely agree
(McNamara, Crossey, 2010) viewed that as composing quality expositions in talented
scholars’ expositions contained phonetic highlights which connected with the text
trouble (sentence structure intricacy, lexical variety, and word recurrence) and complex
language. Besides, they added that making a difference understudy to master
composing methodologies, and build the creative cycle, will help understudies to work
on the complexity of their language and get the higher score. Based on the above results,
the quality of students' writing has been significantly improved after they used the app.
Both of these tools have helped students save maximum time to correct grammatical
errors when applying technology to suggest how to correct mistakes and automatically
replace those errors after the user clicks the correct words. However, because of this
convenience, most students often make basic grammar mistakes when writing on paper.
Instead of having to read to check and correct mistakes, students only need to click
“check spelling and grammar” and they are done, mistakes are corrected within 10
seconds. This may be useful to students in the short term, but we believe that not being
able to correct their own mistakes or even not realizing where or why they are wrong
will affect them in the long term. Grammarly, after realizing this, improved their app
by installing additional functions that provide users with information about their
vocabulary and grammar mistakes. However, these utilities are only provided with the
premium version and as we mentioned when researching the budget of students, most
of them can't afford to upgrade to the version.
25
With the dramatically expanding need for rewording as a device to avoid plagiarism,
students who might have issues in plagiarism can use QuillBot and Grammarly as a
choice to make unique source texts. "Paraphrasing is one way to borrow ideas from a
source without plagiarizing" (Fitria, 2021). Paraphrasing or reevaluating source
material in their own words, is one method for staying away from the plagiarism that
can result from a progression of citations. Students can use the paraphrasing technique
to change the internet report to their own by alter to the synonym words in order to have
the same idea.
Figure 1. Students’ Scores Not Using Support App
A study on the quality of students' work when not using any writing aids was conducted
by the graduate students of the Pangasinan State University. Scores of the graduate
students show that students have lower grammar skills without the grammar checking
software. A proposal at Pangasinan State University is typically 100 pages long and
contains 15,000 to 20,000 words. As a result of the test, the majority of non-English
majors received various critiques from Contextual Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation,
Sentence Structure, Style, and Vocabulary Enhancement. The study is a clear
26
demonstration that the students who use and depend on these tools now have to write
by themselves, are prone to problems with grammar style and vocabulary more than
often. The problems faced by this group of students are serious. In the past, when
students were suggested to use writing apps, their average essay score was in the range
of 83 to 97. According to the results on the board, the score according to the academic
ability and actual ability of the students. the student group is only at 63-80 out of 100.
The plagiarism rate of each student is quite low, even some students have a plagiarism
rate of 0%, along with good ideas about the essay as well as the style. The writing style
is no longer rich and diverse when there are no sample articles and tools to support.
Based on the students' evaluation, we conclude that most of them are satisfied with the
process of using these tools and the utilization of Grammarly as the support device was
exceptionally useful. The innovation and daily improvement of these two tools are
increasingly having a marked influence on the process of completing students' writing.
The benefits these apps provided are not just the students' mistakes were remarkably
diminishing to utilizing Grammarly moreover, student can expand their mindfulness in
how to pick the right word usage, perfect intonation and grammar. However, the fact
that students rely too much on these tools to improve the quality of their writing is
currently a difficult problem to solve and we believe that if we cannot find a solution,
in the long term, their writing and thinking skills will be severely affected.
2.1.2. Reactions after using
In this part of the survey, our team wants to find out the users’ experience after trying
those writing assistant tools on a scale from 1 to 5 (totally disagree to totally agree). In
addition, we have provided many criteria in many different features including the Free
and the Premium version for evaluating the practical experience of the users with those
tools.
27
Respondents' rate of agreement
60
52
50
40
36
38
35
37
30
23
20
16
14
12
10
6
3
6
3
1
3
0
Suggestions accepted
Completely disagree
Reasonable plagiarism rate
Disagree
Neutral
Agree
Scores meet expectation
Completely agree
First of all, we added two assertions about how the tools are helping students. “I usually
select the suggestions from the apps for my work”, and “My plagiarism rate is always
in the acceptable range”. The indicators received were extremely encouraging, “agree”
and “totally agree” were substantially dominant out of all the judgments. Most users
are satisfied with the quality of the features that those apps provide. The opposite
viewpoints account for less than 10% of the total responses collected. Plagiarism,
whether accidental or intentional, is a concern for any writer in high school or college.
Even if you're a freelance writer, you should check your work for plagiarism because
search engines will penalize your website if it detects duplicate content. When
commissioning work from third parties, website owners must also avoid plagiarism.
Both Grammarly and Quillbot offer a great plagiarism checker. Those two apps are able
to check academic words and compare text in your essay to billions of web pages and
major content databases. Thanks to AI technology, the results of plagiarism detection
are very accurate. Moreover, Grammarly and Quillbot both provide many useful
synonyms to replace which can help the users paraphrase easily. That is the reason why
almost AEP students are pleased with the plagiarism checker feature that those two
apps offer.
Next, we continuously added the assertion: “My scores live up to my expectations’’ to
get information about the evaluation of AEP students after using those writing aids. It
28
can be clearly seen from the graph, a majority of AEP students have no difficulty when
using those apps which account for more than 90% of the users surveyed. There are still
only 9 students who do not agree with that statement after using the tools. From that
date, we can see that it is beneficial for AEP students to use the writing assistant tools.
They can have an improvement in their writing skill and the result show that most
students will get an expectational score after using those tools. In contrast, only 9
students from the survey cannot reach their expectations. The reason can be they do not
know how to use those tools above properly. Another reason is that some students are
over- expected those tools or their target scores are too high.
In conclusion, through all the descriptions and analyses above, we can easily see that
the customers’ experience with the tools was fantastic but not so much of the outcome.
There could still be more to upgrade by the developers in order to enhance the users’
experience.
Score improvement
26%
Yes
No
I'm not sure
10%
64%
Finally, after recognizing the practical experiences of students who have used the apps,
we conducted a survey on the improvement of the student’s scores after using the
writing aids. We consider this to be a fairly easy question to answer because scores are
simply numbers, and respondents will easily see progress or setbacks based on clear
numbers; at the same time, grades are also a good way to reflect on the quality of
students’ learning.
It can be seen clearly from the pie chart above, a large number of students said that they
had experienced an improvement in their scores. The number of students who shares
this opinion accounts for approximately 64,1% of 192 surveyed students. From this
figure, we can see that it is not easy to raise your writing scores by using the writing
29
assistant tools. Meanwhile, 25,5% of the students said that they weren’t sure whether
their scores improve or not, and lastly, the number of students who found that their
scores stayed unchanged comprised 10,4% of all the surveyed students. Those figures
are quite noticeable. Grammarly and Quillbot provide many different features which
can help the users to find the grammar errors and boost their fluency and vocabulary
range by offering some synonyms to replace. In addition, the advantages of a web-based
writing environment have enabled students to reflect and learn from each other,
enabling students to receive feedback, providing a good editing environment for
students, and providing a learning environment. Moreover, the advantages are not only
the students' errors were significantly decreased after using Grammarly but also
increased their awareness of how to use the article and choose the right diction. The
writing task will be completed with clarity and coherence which can lead to an
improvement in the overall score. To summarize, from the data our team collected, we
can conclude that the writing assistant tools can help a majority of students improve
their writing scores. As our team initially predicted, the majority of students, after using
the apps, saw an improvement in their scores. This is understandable since their use is
to optimize the paragraphs that users enter by correcting grammar errors, improving
fluency, or even rewriting sentences according to ideas from the original passages with
better clarity. Although there is no content impact, such improvements in appearance
would certainly help to refine the paragraph, thereby increasing the score of the
assignment. On the other hand, for students who said that they did not notice any
improvement in their scores, we boldly guessed that it was because they already had a
fairly good written language ability, so the utility of the tools is not really visible. Or
another reason may be that these students simply do not know how to optimize the use
of Grammarly and Quillbot to achieve the best effect in editing their passages.
Your essay score is in the range of
1%
15%
26%
Under 5.0
5.5-6.0
6.5-8.0
Over 8.5
58%
30
In the next part of the survey, our team wants to get information about AEP students’
range of writing scores. Among the 192 students surveyed, they normally had their
writing scores varied between 6.5 and 8, accounting for three-fifths of the given chart
while more than one-fourth of them seemed to have an improvement in writing skills
with their scores being over 8.5. From 5.5 to 6.0 was the third most popular option as
it was chosen by 15.1% of the students. Lastly, only 1,6% of students surveyed were
reported to have had bad scores that were mostly below 5.0. Those results are
predictable. Almost AEP students have a good background in English because they
have to pass the English entrance exam before participating in the courses. More than
half of those surveyed have an average score of 6.5-8.0 which shows that majority of
AEP students have a good writing quality.
With the support of writing assistant tools, the writing score of AEP students can be
improved a lot. For AEP students who often have to write in English, we found that
6.5-8 is actually a pretty good range. The fact that this selection makes up more than
half of the data indicates that most of the students taking part in this survey have aboveaverage writing abilities. This is an important conclusion and greatly influences the
later analysis of the impact issue we are discussing because students with different
levels and levels of awareness will have different acquisitions, leading them to achieve
different processes in improving their scores and writing abilities. With the results seen
in the provided chart, we believe that, with the level of the writing skill of the students
participating in the survey, the progress or the setback will be very clear, leading to
clear and accurate data that accurately reflect the impact of Grammarly and Quillbot on
AEP students.
31
Improvement on users' knowledge and writing skill
15%
13%
I have noticed great progress.
I've had rather slow and indistinct
progress.
13%
I don't see myself making any
progress.
I feel my skills are getting worse due
to my reliance on tools.
59%
As can be clearly seen, most of them (114 students which are equivalent to 59,4%) had
experienced an improvement in their writing skill after using the tools. And people who
thought that their writing skills were worse than before using the tools rank second with
14,6% (28 students).
It seems that the number of students who thought they didn’t improve anything at all
and the number of students who thought that they had a great progress in writing skills
are the same, as the percentage of both take up to 13% (25 students).
That the majority of students saw positive progress, whether just a little or a lot, clearly
shows the positive effects of Grammarly and Quillbot.
In fact, if you take a closer look, most of these are just slow and not overwhelming
progress; however, with a skill that is as difficult and complex as writing, this, without
any doubt, is a good sign. So how did these students achieve improvements in their
knowledge and skills?
After researching the factors that help to improve writing skills, we found some features
of the two writing assistant tools relating to these factors. First, let's discuss Quillbot's
most popular and prominent feature – paraphrasing. The users select the desired style,
and the application returns an optimized paragraph. By using this, users can see their
ideas more organized and aligned with on-demand writing styles, respectively standard,
fluency, formal, simple, creative, expand and shorten. If students really take the time to
not only read but analyze each style carefully, they will learn a lot about writing style
and how to make their passages more fluent and clearer.
32
In case the user is not satisfied with the resulting passage, the tool provides a list of
synonyms for the words used in the original sentence for the user to choose actively
and freely. This feature will help students expand and improve their vocabulary because
one of the best ways to remember new words in a foreign language is to learn by
synonyms and put them in specific contexts. In terms of Grammarly, because this is a
grammar editing application, users will be prompted for grammatical errors in their
paragraphs and provide suggestions for corrections. It is pretty obvious how this feature
can help students improve their writing: students will be made aware of their mistakes,
whether they are minor mistakes or students are completely wrong about a grammar
rule; if it's the first case, they will definitely remember and be more careful in the future,
and if the other case occurs, students will recognize their lack of knowledge in that
specific area of grammar and learn to improve it.
On the other hand, some students didn't see an improvement in their grades, and we
think the reason may be that they just haven't used it properly, as an article stated:
“Tight’s (2017) examination of learners of Spanish found that while the participants
extensively used digital writing tools, low-level errors were still common in their
output.” (John Maurice Gayed, May Kristine Jonson Carlon, Angelu Mari riola, Jeffrey
S.Cross, 2022) There is no further explanation for this problem rather than the students’
abilities that are not so excellent and maybe also their carelessness.
The setbacks can be explained by the following quotes that we found in an article by
Gilquin, G. & S. Laporte: “Yet, a closer examination of the cases in which online
writing tools have no effect or a negative effect shows that some of learners’ searches
could be made more efficient. It thus appears that the production of an incorrect
formulation despite the use of a writing tool can be traced back to three main causes,
which partly overlap at times. The first one is a lack of attention to detail about the
information that learners have found. … The second cause is a lack of critical thinking
about the information that they retrieve. … Thirdly, the negative effect may be due to
some additional grammatical error that is unrelated to the learner’s search…”
(Samantha Laporte, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, 2021)
Besides, we believe that users' willingness to continue using an application also says a
lot about the evaluation of their experience and what they gain after using it. So, we
asked this question to the survey participants and got the following results:
33
Willingness to continue using the apps
3%
Yes
No
97%
We can see that almost all the surveyed students will continue using these writing
assistant tools in the future. This number accounts for 96,9% of the surveyed students.
Only 3,1% of the students don’t want to use these tools in the future. With such an
almost absolute ratio, it is not difficult for us to conclude that the two tools are very
helpful and beneficial. They must have been of great help to students in the learning
process, having the effect of improving scores and supplementing knowledge, and
helping students improve their skills.
In addition, another question to identify the same idea was asked: "On a scale of 1-5,
would you be willing to recommend these apps to others?" Our group continues to study
statistics to get more information on this issue.
Willingness to recommend the apps
90
82
80
73
70
60
50
40
28
30
20
9
10
0
0
1
2
3
34
4
5
In this part of the survey, we asked the respondents to evaluate their willingness to
suggest and introduce others to use the writing assistant tools on a scale from 1 to 5
(totally disagree to totally agree). The overall statistic is rather promising.
Only 9 people didn’t really want to introduce the tools they were using to other people.
This number of students accounts for only 4,7% of all the students surveyed. Besides,
there were approximately 28 students who kept a neutral status in each assertion. And
finally, we have 82 students said that they highly recommended the tools to others and
73 students definitely recommended their tools to others which respectively accounts
for 42,7% and 38% of all the students surveyed.
Many studies have demonstrated that a user's willingness to recommend an application
or tool to friends and relatives is closely related to this user's satisfaction with that
application or tool. Students must have had good experiences with the app and have
achieved significant results in scores and skill improvement after using it to be able to
choose a willingness level of 4 or higher. None of the respondents had such a bad
experience and impression of the tool that they were strongly reluctant to recommend
them, only a very few were not very willing to recommend it, possibly because they
didn't really consider Grammarly and Quillbot as helpful tools and thought they were a
waste of time. We think that the number of people who chose the neutral did not find
the app too useful, but also did not have a negative experience with the app; they simply
don't see the impact these apps have on their writing.
2.2.
AEP students’ experiences when not using these application
35
Respondents' rate of agreement
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Having
Ability to find
difficulty in suitable writing
expressing idea
styles
Regularly
making
grammar
mistakes
Completely disagree
Assignments
done before
deadline
Disagree
Neutral
Reasonable
plagiarism rate
Agree
Impressive
essay
Scores meet
expectation
Completely agree
Nearly half of the surveyed students believed they felt neutral in agreeing with the
statement “I find it difficult to express my ideas”; 7 students chose to agree with it,
making this the second most popular answer and plus 2 students felt completely agree
with this while only 6 students disagreed. The major of AEP students who are surveyed
found it difficult to express their ideas. They had ideas in Viet Nam but didn’t find
words to say in English or they just couldn’t brainstorm the topic. This is because their
English vocabulary were not good enough or just because they lacked experiences.
Considering the next statement - “I can easily find the right tone for my paragraph,”
exactly 50% said that this is undecidable; on the other hand, the proportion of the four
other options was equally divided. Five students claimed never to have had any
grammar mistakes, while another five admitted they usually made grammatical errors.
The percentages for the options “Neutral” and “Strongly agree” on this statement about
regular grammar mistakes occurrence were 32% and 16%, respectively. From the chart,
we can say that AEP’s grammar skill is not very bad but also not extremely good.
Almost all of them didn’t often make grammar mistakes. Procrastination did not seem
to affect AEP students a lot since only two students said they did not finish the
assignments before the deadline. Next, most students do not consider plagiarism a huge
problem, as 80% of the surveyed students reported having their plagiarized content
percentage in their essays being at an acceptable rate. Six students were confident with
their writing skills and claimed to have had excellent essays that impressed their
teacher, while the majority just chose to describe their level of agreement as “Neutral.”
36
This also was a popular answer to the statement “My score always meets my
expectation” as it was chosen by 44% of the 46 surveyed students.
Overall, we can see that AEP students had good writing skills. Their scores often met
their expectations. However, they still make small mistakes like grammar mistakes,
vocabulary mistakes… and almost all of the students surveyed find that plagiarism is
the biggest problem to them. The setbacks can be explained by the following quotes
that we found in an article by Robin Reigh: Most students who have submitted copied
work as their own genuinely did not realize that what they were doing was considered
cheating. Because most plagiarism is not taking another piece of writing and
reproducing it word-for-word. Instead, plagiarism typically represents a failure to
understand what original work is, and indeed how assignments are structured within a
pedagogical framework. Students often think they are submitting original work because
they have at times been asked to paraphrase or summarize, or because they have been
encouraged to work with a classmate or refer to an expert and they don’t yet understand
what the point of those exercises is or where the line is between attributed reference
and stealing. Ultimately, plagiarism always comes from anxiety that the student’s own
thoughts are not sufficient, but whereas it’s rare for students to actually panic and fully
insert someone else’s work into their own, it’s extremely common in my experience for
students to believe that there simply isn’t more to say on a given topic and that “work”
is artfully regurgitating someone else’s thoughts.
Your essay score is in the range of
11%
22%
17%
Under 5.0
5.5-6.0
6.5-8.0
Over 8.5
50%
Among the 46 students surveyed, 21 of them normally had their writing score varied
between 6.5 and 8.0, accounting for nearly half of the given chart while more than onefifth of them seemed to have excellent writing skills with their scores being over 8.5.
37
From 5.5 to 6.0 was the third most popular option as it was chosen by 17.4% of the
students. Lastly, only 5 students were reported to have had bad writing skills as their
scores were mostly below 5.0. With the index above, we can see that AEP students’
scores mostly range from 6.5 to 8.0. This is a quiet high score and it is above average.
And students whose scores are more than 6.5 accounts for three-forths of all students
surveyed. Overall, we can see that AEP students’ score are usually high, they can use
English well in writing, speaking and interact to some extent. This can be explained by
AEP’s first exam that requires a high English score and all of our majors in AEP are
attached with English so the students can improve their English skills a lot.
After one week of survey and investigation, less than one fifth of the total respondents
had admited to have not used any of our mentioned writing assistant tools such as
Grammarly or Quillbot. As previously mentioned, we believe everyone who chose to
not rely on the AI supports in writing had their own arguments and we appreciate that.
The action consists of both pros and cons and the following section will discuss both
views.
On the one hand, there is a variety of reasons why not using these tools might not really
a good decision. Firstly, it’s all about the precision. Previously in our research, only 16
out of 43 respondents claimed that “Writing assistant tool is not necessary”, meaning
that less than a half of them are confident with their work. The other 27 students might
face the high chances of having writing errors in their final products. Essay has always
been a universal stress for students because in fact, even when they have done the
research, they still don’t know how to write probably, AEP’s students are no exception.
Moreover, students are getting more and more dynamic as they are participating in
professional environment like companies or organization from the very early age. And
in some formal situations like delivering a speech or having an significant email with
clients, it is not very respectful and professional when you make a basic English
mistake. Grammarly and Quillbot can offer you the grammar and spelling checker, or
which helps their work more organized and presentable. Things like “domain”, “intent”,
“audience”, “formality” and anything that is noteworthy in writing can be a piece of
cake with these apps.
Secondly, it takes you double the time to perfect your writing manually. Time is gold,
especially when you are still young, the app’s suggestion can save you some time and
energy for a more productive day. What a pity to refuse such a potential assistance!
On the other hand, beside the advantages brought by technology and Internet, all the
tools or references a student can find might contain a lot of implicit risk. The over
38
reliance on these applications is something inevitable. Within 5 minutes, Quillbot can
rewrite your essays “from H to T”, and no plagiarism can be detected. This status is
now referred as “toxic convenience”. The system can only be used to make selective
word by word, therefore the essay outcome is rather awkward and sometimes ridiculous
to read. Secondly is more like the consequence of the first one, the growing dependence
on AI supports and the lack of awareness might lead to “brain drain”, students then will
become less creative when it comes to writing.
Ms. Wanzer once shared in the New York Times interview about “Why kids can’t
write” that she used to struggle to write what she wanted to express “What voice in my
head?” she wrote in her response to the Lamott essay. “I don’t have one.” This is really
concerning but actually happening to students nowadays, without the personal
materials, a writing can never be fully complete.
All in all, we do encourage students to start trying these apps as they make our students
life more effortless, but we do also alarm that they need to see, to acknowledge the
limitations and let their creativity fly high.
Willingness to experience the application
28%
44%
Yes, I definitely will give it a
try
No, I still do not think it is
necessary to use the tools
I'm not sure
28%
After listing various functions and capabilities of writing assistant tools, we managed
to ask 43 students if they wanted to give them a try and the result is not very promising.
Less than a half of them indicate that they “will definitely try”, the option “don’t need”
and “not sure” share the same portion of 28% (13 students each). All the lucrative
39
promised made by app-builders and the current popularity of these tools among students
surely can attract more users.
Be that as it may, a quarter of our respondents still firmly claimed that they are still in
charge of their own writing and these applications are not necessary, at least for now.
Some of them might be a translator or gifted student who has a way more advanced
support than just this wordy assistance system. Another reason might be that they don’t
want to get too dependent on these, and expect their writing to be more natural, more
characteristic.
The other 28% of “I am not sure” is completely understandable. Due to the time limit
and the particular feature of a survey, we could not add too much information and
introduction about the two specific tools for students to know. Things like the billing
and payment or usage instruction are not included, therefore students might find it
rather vague and not be able to decide at the moment whether they want to take a risk
or not. For instance, a premium Grammarly account might cost around 400,000 VND
per year, this is a serious investment that cannot be spontaneously made within the
length of a questionnaires.
To conclude, firms might try to expand their brand, appearance to get friendlier and
approach more potential users. Especially they can try to develop a trial system since
students are more likely to commit after given a free “full-option” testing, it gives them
the deeper insight and time to realize the importance of these apps.
3. Some effective solutions for these issues
3.1.
For student
Through research, our team found a few key criteria for a good essay, including focus,
development, unity, coherence, and correctness. (Dr. Murray, Anna C. Rockowitz, n.d.)
The first three are content-based and can only be controlled by the writer; however, the
last two factors can be optimized easily and quickly by software tools. This convenience
offers great opportunities for students in terms of both time savings and output quality,
but it also leads to another problem: students are gradually becoming dependent on
these tools. Therefore, our team finds it necessary to come up with some solutions for
students to have a reasonable way to use Grammarly and Quillbot without relying too
much on them.
It is a fact that the results given by the app are not always correct, or not optimal, so it
is necessary to double-check the recommended sentences. As proven by a study: “The
40
three most predictive features from Coh-Metrix of essay quality were syntactic
complexity (as measured by number of words before the main verb), lexical diversity
(as measured by MTLD), and word frequency (as measured by Celex, logarithm for all
words).” (Danielle S. McNamara, Scott A. Crossley, Philip M. McCarthy, 2009), a
small element to improve the quality of the essay is syntactic complexity, which we
believe is not supported by the tools. Instead, the tools are mainly geared towards
concise, concise, and easy-to-understand writing. This somewhat advanced criterion is
entirely based on the individual ability of the writer, and also on their research and
refinement.
However, in terms of grammar diversity, the tools are quite good companions, because
as long as the user hovers over the sentence they want to correct, the screen will show
a few different expressions. with different structures. Thanks to this utility, students can
learn new structures and diversify the grammar used in their essays. The same applies
to word frequency; the tools provide a wide range of synonyms, from simple words to
phrasal verbs for users to freely choose, helping students' writing not to be filled with
repeated words and have a rich vocabulary. In short, the first solution we offer is that
students need to check the results of the tools, study them carefully and spend time
optimizing them, not directly copying them.
The second solution we want to propose is that users need to think of Grammarly and
Quillbot as applications that support not only in terms of test results, and grades but
also knowledge because we can learn innumerable things in the process of using these
applications. Let's take the fourth of the five factors mentioned above as an example.
Quillbot is best known for its grammar correction feature, and it really does well in this
section. So, users just need to click on ‘Accept’ when the tool's repair suggestion dialog
comes up, and then the tool will fix those mistakes for us. It's so easy and fast that we
don't even need to pay attention to what the error is about, or how the application
suggests fixing it... This is the problem students need to look at. And if it continues, the
students will not be able to progress in their knowledge and writing skills. The score
will increase, but it is just a cliché because the writer has not really seen and understood
the mistake he made in order to learn from it. So, what should be done here? Students
should review the mistakes that the app points out, pay attention to them and also how
the app suggests fixing errors in order to know their mistakes and learn from them to
gain more knowledge and improve their writing in the future. There is no difference
when it comes to Quillbot: using this tool, users need to pay more attention to the
resulting paragraph, for example, how to shorten it, remove any redundant words, and
change the concise structure… or how the tool converts between styles by adding or
41
deleting words and reversing the sentence order… We can really learn a lot from this
AI teacher.
3.2.
For Grammarly and Quillbot
Although the writing assistant tools such as Grammarly and Quillbot have many great
features to help the users boost their writing scores, but there are also some limitations
that need to be improved to by the developers to enhance the users’ experience.
While Grammarly are available in multiple platforms- the users can use it anytime,
anywhere as long as they own an electronic device which are connected with Internet,
but with Quillbot, students have to login to their website because Quillbot does not
provide the application on iOS or Android. To use these tools, users must access
through browser extension, MS Word and Google Docs. Therefore, Quillbot should
develop on multiple flatforms especially IOS and Android. Besides, although Quillbot
provides the users diverse features compared to Grammarly, but it is also the reason
why there are many misleading comments on the interface of Quillbot. It is quite
confusing and contains too much information that the students may have many
difficulties when using it. So that, Quillbot need to improve the interface to be simpler
and the instructions are also needed at the beginning of the webpage. In addition, both
two softwares need to improve the accuracy of each feature. In term of Quillbot,
sometimes, the suggested words do not match the context of the sentence, making the
sentence incoherent and affecting the writing scores of the users if they choose those
suggested words. While Grammarly needs to have a better improvement on grammar
checker because some teachers have told us that Grammarly checker is unreliable in
some cases. Moreover, Grammarly should update on slang and common words that
teenagers use a lot nowadays to detect the errors easier. Besides, the prices for the
Premium version in both Grammarly and Quillbot are too high for students because
they are not financially independent and have no or very low income. Those apps can
have some discounts for students or cooperate with schools and universities to make it
popular with the students. Finally, Grammarly and Quillbot should have a free trial for
the Premium version for a limited time before spending amount of money to buy the
Premium version.
3.3.
For AEP
AEP is known for high tuition fees with high educational services. With such high fees,
AEP should provide students with these tools’ Premium version to improve educational
services. The Pangasinan State University in Philippines started its subscription to the
42
Premium Accounts of Grammarly in 2018. The study gives the institution information
on its usability based on user feedback. The researcher recommended that the accounts
be renewed because they are still usable. It also proposes that the MIS department
collaborate closely with the Grammarians to ensure that the accounts are fully utilized.
This outcome also serves as a basis for confirming the findings of a prior study on the
app's utility. The end result demonstrates that, despite its limitations, Grammarly is
valuable as regarded by its users.
Students’ accounts should get access to Premium versions like the way our school did
with Outlook and Canvapro. Students can have a better experience, improve
significantly their writing skills, get better scores on the exam and have more
opportunities with a much better CV, ...
Moreover, AEP should organize courses for students which guide and give students
how to use writing assistant tools smartly, learn from them and not just rely on them. If
students are trained properly, writing assistant tools can become effective tools for their
life.
Last but not least, tools like Grammarly and Quillbot are just supportive tools. AEP
should also organize courses about English skills like writing, presenting, and speaking.
These skills can help students improve their English and in the long run, it will help
students much more comfortable, confident, and independent from using the tools.
CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION
1. About the usage habit of AEP students of using these application
Based on the result of study, our team can conclude that Grammarly and Quillbot
are an online-based platforms which are purposively developed to assist students to
have a better communication to other people in a simple way producing the language
in excellent and enjoyable writing. The majority of AEP students agree that those
writing assistant tools are usable. The students evaluated the strength of Grammarly
that helps the users enhance their writing skills such as automatic detection of mistakes
in Grammar, Punctuation, Sentence Structure, Style and Vocabulary Enhancement, and
Conceptual Writing while Quillbot is a paraphrasing and summarizing tool that helps
users save time by rewriting any sentence, paragraph, or article using artificial
intelligence. Although those apps have many advantages that can improve the users’
writing skills, it is also suggested that the softwares should improve its features to avoid
43
misleading feedback from the users. Even though Grammarly and Quillbot are powerful
tools for writing in English, but a human cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence.
2. About the impacts of writing aids on the study results of AEP’s students
-
The positive impact:
Grammarly is not only able to identify punctuation (such as the missing
spaces after the periods) and the spelling mistakes, including the proper noun and
provided several alternative possibilities for the misspelled words, but also
identify fragments and offer advice on verb form, although often no suggested
corrections are presented, and explanations were complex. This can help students
save a lot of time, make writing become much more easier and have a higher score
on the results.
Moreover, these tools help users get better grades and also better opportunities to
achieve goal in life. With the assistance of these tools, they can write a better
paragraph without some grammar mistakes, the plagiarism. Besides, writing
assistant tools help students improve writing skills, writing report or even doing
English homework by getting familiar with the words suggested, the grammar and
the intonation.
-
The negative impact:
The quality of students' writing has been significantly improved after they
used the app. Both of these tools have helped students save maximum time to correct
grammatical errors when applying technology to suggest how to correct mistakes
and automatically replace those errors after the user clicks the correct words.
However, because of this convenience, most students often make basic grammar
mistakes when writing on paper or correctly copy the article or another student’s
essay. Instead of having to read to check and correct mistakes and write by
themselves, students only need to click “check spelling and grammar” and
“paraphrase” button and they are done, mistakes and plagiarism are corrected within
10 seconds. This may be useful to students in the short term, but we believe that not
being able to correct their own mistakes or even not realizing where or why they are
wrong will affect them in the long term.
3. About some effective solutions
Grammarly and Quillbot are certainly useful tools, but only when used rationally
and effectively without abusing them. Users need to find a way to utilize them to
optimize the use of these two tools to bring progress not only in grades in the short
44
term but in skills and knowledge in the long term. In this study, we have proposed
two solutions: first, check the results that the tool gives and second, learn from them.
These are not the best and only solutions; however, we believe that they also help
students find the optimal and appropriate use to improve the quality of your writing
and knowledge.
Quillbot should develop on multiple flatforms especially IOS and Android and
improve the interface to be simpler, also the instructions are also needed at the
beginning of the webpage. On the other hand, Grammarly needs to have a better
improvement on grammar checker, update on slang and common words. Lastly,
both Grammarly and Quillbot should have a free trial for the Premium version and
provides discounts for students.
AEP should provide students with these tools’ Premium version to improve
educational services and organize courses for students with the guide that teaches
students how to use writing assistant tools smartly, learn from them and not just rely
on them.
45
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