Timing Evidence Checks for LLM-Assisted Academic Work: A Protocol and Synthetic Scenario Analysis
Engineering educators and students increasingly use large language models for writing, code, design reasoning, and scholarly communication, creating a need for safeguards whose completion can be evidenced at the right point in an academic workflow. This paper develops a conceptual protocol that places authorization and data classification before use, process controls during work, and verification and disclosure before release. An author-coded validity assessment maps seven existing safeguards to nine proposed risk domains, and a reproducible synthetic model compares fixed, stage-aligned, and risk-adaptive presentation under explicit assumptions about hazards, efficacy, adherence, effort, and routing error. The model is an assumption map, not an effectiveness study. In the primary scenario, presenting all seven safeguards at a fixed point produced modeled net loss of 2.608, compared with 2.219 for stage-aligned, applicability-filtered presentation. A synthetic 2×2 decomposition yielded 2.537 for fixed-filtered and 2.240 for staged-all presentation, indicating that most primary separation follows the assumed overload response rather than filtering. With overload disabled, fixed and staged versions using the same selection rule tied exactly under paired simulation; when the probability of returning to each later stage was 0.30, staged-filtered presentation was slightly worse than fixed-all presentation. Adaptive routing broke even at sensitivity 0.64 in the primary setting and 0.72 when routing errors concentrated in high-stakes tasks. The contribution is a testable design and reporting framework for LLM-use safeguards, not evidence that staging improves real academic work.
Authors
- Lauren Mercer
- Maya Kalyani Reed
- Hoang Justin Tran
- Alexander J. Garnier (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5211-5722)
Institutions
- Simon Fraser University (CA)
- Concordia University (CA)
- University of Missouri (US)
- Université Grenoble Alpes (FR)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2026-11-02
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/xr6ds_v1
- Primary Topic
- Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Type
- preprint