I just finished writing my essays for the Coolidge scholarship. If you’ve applied this year, you know they’re really strict about not using AI. They’ve warned that anyone caught using AI will be disqualified.
I didn’t use AI at all while writing. I researched everything myself, using the sources they provided and some extra ones. A lot of the essays were about my own goals and experiences, so I couldn’t have used AI anyway.
But when I checked my work with an AI detector, it flagged my essays as being 30-60% AI-generated! This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. I don’t know if my writing just comes across as robotic or what?
Does anyone know how scholarships check for AI usage? Am I in trouble here?
PS: I even ran the essay prompts through the detector, and they also came back as partially AI-generated!
I saw a video where a professor tried figuring out if a paper was written by AI or not. It’s really hard to tell. AI often gives away its presence by listing things in sets of three. But honestly, those AI detection tools aren’t very reliable.
I hope you didn’t try adding mistakes on purpose because they said grammar and spelling are big factors in their decisions.
I’ve had AI detectors falsely flag my work too, especially when I’ve included quotes. If you made it clear which parts were quoted and cited properly, they should understand if their AI check finds something weird.
Harley said:
Honestly, you could try adding small mistakes here and there, like a missing comma or leaving out a period. That might lower the AI score.
I thought about that, but I feel like even tiny mistakes might hurt my chances of getting selected. It’s too risky.
@Frost
That’s fair. But you could focus on subtle things, like a missing period at the end of a paragraph. It might help throw off the detector without making your writing look bad.
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