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Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 23, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

UMass Amherst instructors use Perusall, an AI-supported reading platform integrated with Canvas, where students annotate course texts together online. Perusall's AI automatically scores each student's participation — evaluating the quality and depth of their annotations — so instructors don't have to grade hundreds of comments by hand.

Details

Perusall's machine learning model evaluates student annotations against up to seven criteria, producing participation scores without instructor manual review. The model is pre-trained — meaning it was trained before deployment and does not continue learning from UMass student data. Perusall is listed on UMass Amherst's official Canvas LTI integration list as an "AI-supported discussion platform with automated participation grading," confirming its sanctioned deployment. Instructors retain full control over assignment design and can override scores.

Products affected

PerusallCanvas LMS

Sources & Evidence

Company Disclosure

Company DisclosureVerified

How Do I Consider the Impact of AI Tools in My Courses?

Center for Teaching & Learning, UMass Amherst

https://www.umass.edu/ctl/how-do-i-consider-impact-ai-tools-my-courses

Company DisclosureVerified

Every student prepared for every class

Perusall

https://www.perusall.com/

Company DisclosureVerified

Canvas Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) List

IDEAS, UMass Amherst

https://www.umass.edu/ideas/lti

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). University of Massachusetts Amherst: UMass Amherst instructors use Perusall, an AI-supported reading platform integrated with Canvas, where students annotate course texts together online. Perusall's AI automatically scores each student's participation — evaluating the quality and depth of their annotations — so instructors don't have to grade hundreds of comments by hand (data as of 2026-03-23) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/148d6edd-c556-491e-8644-82d6b255041b. Accessed October 12, 2026.

Stable link: https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/148d6edd-c556-491e-8644-82d6b255041b
Data as of: March 23, 2026
Last verified: March 23, 2026

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by University of Massachusetts Amherst

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