Perusall includes several AI-powered features that support discussion, scoring, and analytics. While some features cannot be fully disabled, instructors can adjust settings to limit or opt out of specific AI behaviors in their courses.
Perusall uses AI to support teaching and help instructors manage student engagement. Its AI features fall into three main categories:
- Automatic Scoring - Uses supervised machine learning to suggest quality scores for student comments/questions based on thoughtfulness and effort. Instructors have full control and may override or ignore scores at any time.
- AI‑Suggested Discussion Prompts - Instructors can highlight text and receive generative‑AI–based prompt suggestions to spark discussion. Faculty can preview, edit, accept, or discard these prompts.
- Confusion Report - A generative‑AI tool that clusters and summarizes student questions into topic areas, helping instructors quickly identify what students find confusing which is especially useful in large courses.
Please Note: Perusall states that student and instructor data are not used by third‑party providers to train their AI models, and instructors retain full control over how (or whether) AI‑generated elements are used. For more information please visit the How does Perusall use AI support article on the vendor's support site.
Table of Contents
This article outlines the available options and where to find them in the new Perusall interface, including:
Overview: What Can be Controlled?
Perusall does not offer a single “turn off AI” toggle, but you can adjust the following:
- AI-generated discussion prompts
- Auto-scoring (including AI quality ratings)
- Engagement analytics (including confusion reports)
While some background features, such as syllabus-based information extraction, remain enabled, they are minimally intrusive and do not require instructor action.
Each of these features is managed separately within your course settings.
Disable AI-Generated Discussion Prompts
Perusall may generate discussion prompts using generative AI. If you prefer not to use this feature:
- Open your Perusall course.
- Navigate to Settings in the left-hand menu.
- Select the Advanced tab.
- Select Commenting
- Toggle the "Hide instructor option to use AI to generate suggested discussion prompts" option to off.
- Click the Save Changes button in the bottom-right corner.
For more details on how this feature appears in the current interface, refer to:
Using generative AI to generate discussion prompts. (Vendor Guide).
Using Auto-Scoring Without AI Quality Ratings
By default, Perusall’s auto-scoring evaluates student comments using an AI-driven high / medium / low quality scale.
If you want to keep auto-scoring but remove AI-based quality judgments, you can switch to participation-based scoring:
- Navigate to Settings in the left-hand menu.
- Select Scoring.
- Click Scoring templates.
- Open your template using the three-dot menu (⋯) and choose Edit.
- Select the Comment content only button from the scoring setting presets.
- Change grading so only the Comment Content criteria is set to 100% (all comments receive full credit).
- When done click the Ok button in the bottom-right corner of the menu.
This approach:
- Gives students credit for participation
- Allows you to manually address low-quality comments
- Removes AI-based quality ratings
For more information, please see: How do I use scoring templates? (Vendor Guide)
Note: This does not disable other AI features such as analytics.
Turn Off Auto-Scoring and Analytics (Including Confusion Report)
To fully opt out of Perusall’s automated scoring and analytics features:
- Navigate to Settings in the left-hand menu.
- Locate course analytics or engagement settings.
- Disable:
- Auto-scoring
- Engagement analytics
- Confusion report
These settings are covered in detail here:
Setting up and controlling course analytics (Vendor guide)
Turning these off will:
- Stop automatic grading
- Prevent analytics dashboards from populating
- Disable AI-generated insights like confusion reports
Learning Objectives and AI
Perusall may automatically extract information from your syllabus to support course setup.
- This feature does not require activation by the instructor.
- You can still manually edit or add learning objectives at any time.
For more information, see:
How to add learning objectives to your Perusall course (Vendor guide)
For more help, please contact [email protected].