this is stressing me out and i need to understand what actually happened
i’m an international student and english is my second language. i write carefully because i have to, i can’t rely on idioms or casual phrasing the way native speakers can. my writing tends to be formal and structured because that’s how i learned academic english.
my professor flagged my last essay for AI. i did not use AI to write it. i used grammarly for corrections and looked up a few words in a dictionary app. that’s it.
i’ve read that ESL writing can get flagged because it has similar patterns to AI output. is that accurate? is there any way to demonstrate that the flagged essay is actually mine?
yes, ESL writing is one of the most documented false positive categories for AI detectors. formal structure, careful grammar, avoidance of idiomatic phrases, consistent register. all of those are things ESL writers do deliberately and all of those are also features detectors associate with AI.
your professor should know this. if they don’t, that’s a gap in how detection tools are being implemented at your institution. you have grounds to contest the flag
from a university lecturer perspective: the flag should be the beginning of a conversation, not a conclusion. a detector score alone is not evidence of misconduct.
what helps in an appeal: show your drafts if you have them. show browser history or notes if relevant. explain your writing process. consistent writing style across all your submissions is also evidence, and your professor should be looking at your body of work, not one score
the research on this is clear. multiple published studies have shown false positive rates for ESL writing between 30 and 60 percent depending on the tool and the language background. if your institution is using detection as a disciplinary trigger without accounting for this, that’s a policy failure.
document everything. request the specific tool and score that was used. most academic integrity policies require more than a detection score to initiate formal proceedings
i’m a grad student and a TA and this is one of the reasons i won’t use detector scores alone to flag student work. the false positive problem for non-native speakers is real and well-documented.
if you’re going through an appeal, look up your institution’s academic integrity policy and find the exact language about what constitutes evidence. “a detector flagged it” is almost never sufficient on its own under those policies
ngl this is one of the situations where detectors are straight up broken. the tool literally cannot distinguish between “wrote carefully because english is hard” and “AI wrote this.” those are the same signal to the algorithm.
keep your drafts for every assignment going forward. timestamps matter