EPQ Plagiarism and AI Detection (ChatGPT)

Hi,

I've submitted my EPQ about 2 months ago and I can't help thinking about it (which I know is pointless and bad). I have a few concerns regarding my EPQ. I'm scared that I have accidentally plagiarised something by not referencing properly or something which I wrote myself sounds like it's been written by AI. I recently put my EPQ through an AI detector and it said that it was likely written by AI when I wrote everything myself. However, I used ChatGPT, not for writing my essay but for some ideas on how to structure it. I was just curious about how they mark your EPQ or if they put every single dissertation through a plagiarism or AI checker? I heard something about taking a sample but I'm not completely sure. If I take a sentence from a source and maybe reword it slightly, but I've referenced it, does that still qualify as plagiarism? Sorry for the ramble, I'm just completely scared and nervous.

Thanks

Hey I actually don’t know if it’s the same for your school but what they did at mine was my supervisor made us submit our essays on a site called turn it in. The site then goes through our entire essay and publishes a report with a plagiarism percentage. In the report itself is a highlighted version of your essay. Any part highlighted was a successful attempt of the site to match resources online to any phrases, full on sentences and even sometimes a couple of words you have used in your essay. Like you mentioned above, in my own essay, I have copied different sentences from different sources but have reworded them. This was still detected as plagiarism by turn it in. However after speaking to my teacher about this and my plagiarism score of 36%, she said that this was ok as 1. My topic was indeed highly scientific and you can only reword such concepts in a number of ways and 2. The reason my plagiarism score was so high was that others have published their own research (people at university) online about the same topic. So I made no further changes. My teacher then said that all aspects of the EPQ are marked internally at our school and will be moderated internally and some lucky individuals will have theirs sent of to the exam board so marking is standardised. So to answer your question no I don’t think it counts as plagiarism. For me personally, I referenced everything and did in-text citations. Just received my EPQ result and am very pleased as it did not change post moderation and no comment about plagiarism was made. Don’t stress too much and hope it works out well!