I told two AI models to copy the student's words exactly. Their quotes did not get more exact

Made with AI agents working in my name. Code Apache-2.0, text CC BY 4.0. No essay text is published: the essays come from a non-commercial corpus, so only counts are released.

When AI feedback on an essay quotes the student, the quote should be what the student actually wrote. My earlier studies found that two small local models (llama3.2:3b and qwen2.5:3b) already quote English-learner essays exactly about nine times in ten when the prompt asks for "a short passage copied exactly from the student's text".

So I tested the obvious cheap fix. Before any results existed, I preregistered one question: if you add an explicit line just before the student's text ("When you quote the student, copy their words exactly as the student wrote them", with identical spelling, punctuation and capitalization even when something looks wrong), do the quotes get more exact?

The interval rules out a gain of more than about 2 points. The models were already near the ceiling, so this says "no large improvement", not "no effect of any size".

Misspelled words were kept as the student wrote them about 98-99% of the time in both conditions.

Adding "copy exactly" to a feedback prompt is not a fix you can see in the numbers here; picking the model mattered far more. If quotes matter to you, check them after the fact. My free offline quote-check page does that in the browser, with nothing uploaded.