Second year, and an essay I wrote myself came back flagged at 71% AI by whatever my department uses. I write formally because English is my third language and that is how I learned it.
What I actually want to understand is what the detection is doing and what people are really being caught by, because I suspect the software is the least of it. Has anybody marked these for a living and can say what the giveaway actually is?
Your suspicion about why you got flagged is well documented. A widely cited Stanford study found detectors flagged the majority of essays by non-native English speakers as generated while almost never flagging native speakers, because simpler vocabulary and more predictable sentence structure is exactly what the statistics read as machine.
That is the reason several universities stopped relying on detection, and why most current guidance for teachers says a score should start a conversation rather than settle one. Quote that at them.
The thing that catches people in my experience is simply asking them to explain a paragraph.
Practical advice for everybody reading rather than for your current problem: write in something that keeps version history and leave it on. An essay that grew over four days with deletions and rewrites looks nothing like one that appeared in a single paste, and that record is the only defence that does not depend on anybody believing you.
Invented sources are the other half. A citation that does not exist is usually how a suspicion turns into a finding, and it is worth checking your own references for that reason alone.
@marks_200_essays · 7d ago · 3 replies
I mark a couple of hundred a term and I stopped opening the detector score about a year ago. It is decent on raw unedited output and it falls apart once anybody has rewritten the text, which means it catches the laziest cases and nothing else.
What actually gives people away is that the essay answers a slightly different question. It writes a good general piece about the topic and never touches the specific prompt, the set readings, or the thing we argued about in a seminar. An essay floating above the module is the tell, and no software is involved.
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@flagged_my_draft · 7d ago
So what do I actually say to my department? Right now I just have a number and a denial.
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@marks_200_essays · 6d ago
Ask what evidence exists beyond the score, in writing, and ask for the policy. Then offer to talk them through your argument, which is the strongest thing you have because you wrote it. Bring your drafts and version history if the document has any.
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