Your essay was flagged. Here's what to do.

About: How to appeal a false flag

AI detectors are not courts. They produce a probability score, and the score is sometimes wrong, especially on careful academic writing, non-native English, autistic writing, and heavily revised prose. If you wrote your essay yourself and it has been flagged, you have a problem to solve, but you are not in trouble yet.

The key thing to hold onto: a detector flag is a signal, not a verdict. Every reasonable academic-integrity process, including the ones we recommend teachers adopt on /for-teachers/ai-policy-templates, treats the flag as the start of a conversation, not the end.

Step-by-step

1. Don't panic. Don't apologize for something you didn't do. The instinct to say "I'm sorry I'll do better" under stress is real, and it reads as admission in a meeting. Read the flag, read any policy your school has, and wait to respond until you've collected the evidence below.
2. Collect draft history. This is the single most important thing. Open the Google Doc or Word file you drafted in. Check that version history is on (it usually is by default). Take screenshots of at least three distinct points in the drafting process, a rough early version, a revised middle version, and a final version. The timestamps are what matter.
3. Collect your research notes. If you took any notes during research, scribbled outlines, margin notes on a reading, a brainstorm doc, gather them. These show your thinking before the essay existed.
4. Get a writing sample. An earlier essay from this class or from a prior class establishes your baseline voice. Detectors that flag a formal academic essay often clear a casual one from the same student. That's evidence your voice, not AI, is what the detector is responding to.
5. Request the meeting in writing. Email your teacher. Be short and calm: "I understand my essay was flagged by the AI detector. I wrote it myself and would like to talk through the evidence. I've gathered my draft history and a writing sample from [earlier class]. What time works this week?"
6. Bring the evidence to the meeting. Walk through your draft history on screen. Show the early messy version and how it evolved. Explain specific choices, why this sentence, why that source. Teachers can tell when a student knows their own essay inside out.
7. If the teacher won't change the decision, ask about the next step. Most schools have a formal appeal to a dean or academic-integrity officer. Ask what the procedure is. Put it in writing. Do not skip the teacher-level conversation first, that's where most false flags resolve.
8. Document everything. Save the emails, save the screenshots, save your evidence in a single folder. You probably won't need it a month from now. If you do, you'll be glad you saved it.

What weakens an appeal

• Offering to "rewrite it this time." That reads as admission.
• Arguing the detector is bad in general. It might be, but that's not the case in this meeting. The case is your essay, your voice, your process.
• Not having draft history. This is why we suggest every student draft in a tool with version history, every essay, from the start of term.

If the detector was ours

If a teacher flagged you using aiessaydetector.ai, the same principles apply. We publish the false-positive rate of our detector on /transparency, it is not zero. A score is a signal; the evidence is your draft history.