Committed to protecting academic integrity for years, we’ve witnessed it all. The moment plagiarism has become a number one concern in education. The rise and fall of essay mills. AI’s evolution from being banned in schools to empowering teachers and students in new ways of learning.

How has the educational landscape changed in 2025? And, most importantly, how do these trends influence academic future? We’ve spoken with the teachers and students, and reviewed the numbers to provide statistics for the PlagiarismCheck.org 2025 report.

Plagiarism in academic writing

According to the surveyed college educators, 15% of the 2025 final works contained plagiarism. They note that before conducting an Originality & Writing Ethics workshop, this number reached 80%. Poor paraphrasing is named the number one reason for plagiarism occurrence in students’ papers.

An average percentage of plagiarism found by PlagiarismCheck.org in submitted papers in 2025 was 8-21%. To compare, in 2024, this number ranged from 11% to 43%, and on average, from 15% to 25% from 2022 to 2023.

Here is a reminder of how much plagiarism is considered acceptable in academic works.

An average percentage of matches in the submitted texts found in online sources decreased from 40-65% in 2017-2023 to 20-40% in 2023-2025.

At the same time, the percentage of matches found in the students’ works within the same group, assuming they were copying from each other, increased from 30-51% in 2020-2022 to 54-70% in 2023-2025.

An average percentage of matches found in the paid scientific database was 27-47% as of November 2025.

Average percentage of matches with materials from homework-help and study-sharing platforms (e.g., Coursehero, Chegg, etc) – 3-11% over the years of monitoring, 2023-2025.

AI in education

Among the surveyed students, only 1 out of 10 didn’t use ChatGPT for writing a final semester paper.

According to the educators, at least 50% of grade 9 students and about 20% of the grade 10 students use AI “heavily, then try to edit it to pass checkers, even with the warnings of a loss of 20% of the mark.”

10-25% is an average of the AI-generated content detected in the submitted text in 2025 by PlagiarismCheck.org TraceGPT checker. In 2024, the number was 16,1-26,1%.

Geography

As of 2025, most educators and students who use paid plagiarism checking and AI detecting tools are from

  • the USA (55,10%),
  • the UK (5,30%),
  • Australia (3,80%),
  • Canada (3,80%),
  • South Africa (2,10%).

The top 5 countries with teachers and students who use free plagiarism and AI detection are 

  • the USA (34,40%),
  • India (8,70%),
  • Indonesia (3,80%),
  • the Philippines (3,80%),
  • Peru (3,70%).

Final word

Plagiarism and AI misuse tendencies are not drastically increasing. However, they change along with the AI models and checkers, shifting the focus from “how much” to “in which way” the students work with the sources and AI chatbots.

Having become an integral part of the educational process, AI tools continue to challenge instructors and students to implement them constructively. Plagiarism and AI detecting tools are the key to fair evaluation and protecting academic integrity. Moreover, new tasks are calling for new detection methods, making the instruments like the Fingerprint Authorship Verificator an essential addition to the teachers’ toolkit.

Originality & Writing Ethics classes and workshops have also proven vital for educating the students on plagiarism and AI misuse and encouraging honest work.