My Professor Thinks My Essay Was AI. I Wrote It At 2am On My Couch.
I got the email an hour after lecture this morning, standing in the campus bodega line for a too-sweet iced latte that leaked through the paper cup onto the thigh of my gray sweatpants before I even got back to the dining hall. I wiped it off with a napkin and pulled out my laptop to check the grade for the personal essay I turned in two weeks ago, and there it was: no letter grade, just a one-paragraph comment that made my hands go cold enough to drop my latte.
“I have concerns this work was not authored by you. Please come to my office hour this week to discuss. AI-generated work violates the course honor code.”
I sat down at a sticky dining hall table with my cold fries and re-read the comment three times before I could even breathe. This was the essay I wrote after my grandma’s knee surgery, for my 19th century lit class, the one I actually cared about. My first two essays for this class were B-minus messes I turned in 10 minutes before the deadline, half-edited, full of run-on sentences and typoes I missed because I was cramming. But this one? I wrote the first half of it on my phone while I sat in the hospital waiting room, waiting for them to bring her out of recovery. I finished it on my beat-up 2018 MacBook, the one with a sticky G key from that iced coffee I spilled last semester, sitting on my lumpy dorm couch at 2am, crying a little when I wrote about the fence in her backyard.
I rambled in it, for God’s sake. I added a whole tangent about how her tomatoes always taste like soap because she refuses to move them even though they’re planted right next to the mint. I wrote about how the rotting fence board has my grandpa and grandma’s initials carved into it from 1972, and she won’t replace the board even though the whole fence is falling down. I quoted that Wordsworth passage we read about finding home in nature, messed up the citation twice before I got it right. I left the part about the initials in even after I crossed it out three times because I thought it was too sappy. That’s my essay. How is that AI?
I tried to pull up my draft history to prove it, right? That’s the first thing my roommate told me to do when I showed her the email. But here’s the stupid thing: I turned on auto-delete for old Google Doc versions last month because I was running out of storage space for all my lecture recordings. All that’s left is the final version. I still have the little notebook I jotted notes in, though. I was sitting next to grandma’s hospital bed while she napped after surgery, and I scribbled down “tomatoes soap, mint too close, weeds pull easier after rain, initials in fence” in messy blue pen, and there’s a coffee stain right on the page from the terrible hospital coffee I was drinking. But would that even count? What if he says I just wrote those notes after I got the email, to cover it up? It’s not like it’s dated or anything.
I ran into him at the grocery store last weekend, actually. I was buying frozen pepperoni pizza and a pack of gum, and he was pushing a cart full of oat milk and bananas, and we just nodded at each other and kept walking. Now I can’t stop overthinking that. Did I seem rude? Does he already think I’m the kind of kid who cheats and avoids eye contact? I don’t even know. I’ve used AI once before, for what it’s worth—last semester, I used it to brainstorm topic ideas for a group presentation. Does that mean I’m automatically guilty here? I didn’t use it for this. I didn’t.
I walked past the English department building after class today, and I ducked behind a vending machine when I saw his door was propped open and he was standing there talking to another professor. That’s so embarrassing, I know. But I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t walk over and say hey, you wanted to talk about my essay, right? My face would have turned bright red and I would have started stuttering, and he would have thought that meant I was guilty anyway.
People keep giving me advice, like it’s that easy. My roommate says go to office hours, bring the notebook, explain what happened. My friend from high school says offer to rewrite the whole essay in front of him right there, to prove you can do it. But that feels so demeaning, doesn’t it? Like I’m already guilty before I even open my mouth. I shouldn’t have to prove I didn’t cheat. I turned in my work, I did it honestly, why is my good work suddenly suspicious just because it’s better than the garbage I turned in when I was procrastinating?
I re-read the essay myself an hour ago, just to see if I could tell if it sounded “fake” like he thinks. I don’t know what AI sounds like, honestly. I guess it doesn’t have a sticky G key typo that I missed? Wait, I checked, there is one, actually. I wrote “rand” instead of “hand” in the part about pulling weeds, and I missed it when I edited. Does that count as human? Would AI miss that? I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now.
It’s 9pm now, I’m sitting on that same lumpy couch I wrote the essay on, there’s a crumb of granola bar stuck in the crack between the cushions, my cat is sitting on my foot warming it. The notebook with my notes is sitting on my desk right next to me, coffee stain and all. I still haven’t replied to the email. Office hours are tomorrow at 1pm.
Part of me wants to get up tomorrow, put on clean sweatpants, bring the notebook, go sit in his office and tell him the whole thing, from the hospital waiting room to the auto-delete on my Google Drive. Part of me just wants to accept the zero, or drop the class, get a W on my transcript and not have to fight someone who’s already made up his mind that I’m a cheater. I didn’t do anything wrong. But that doesn’t seem to count for much right now. I just wish I didn’t have to prove it.
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