Why John Locke Writing Competition Sucks (Now)

I have been recommending students take the John Locke writing competition for years. It was free, fairly challenging, and somewhat recognized by universities. But after the 2026 cycle, I can no longer recommend it. At this point, it has a decent chance to be a huge waste of time for any participant.

Reason No.1 AI Use​

I know for a fact that someone got shortlisted using 100% AI-generated and humanized essays. These essays contain idiotic paraphrases that can be immediately spotted by any human examiner. For example, for the prompt on cashless society, the AI humanizer switches out the word cash (or currency, money, monetary) and replaces it with the word bill. Cryptocurrency becomes crypto bill. If a human had read these essays, not even have to be very carefully, they would have spotted these weird usages. The fact that these essays got shortlists strongly suggests that AI was at least involved in grading the first-round essays, most likely without human supervision.

I’m not some old geezer who is against using AI. I’m complaining because, one, it is not fair when the rule is clearly against using AI and then someone got in with AI and the organizers themselves are using AI and don’t even bother to check the AI’s works. Two, if you treat your own rules like horse shit then this competition has no value to either the participant or the universities that they are going to apply because the results signal nothing but false qualification.

Reason No.2 Bad Prompts

The point of taking a writing competition is to tackle a complicated problem and have someone with credentials to check your work (and then compare your standing with your peers). A few years back, a theology prompt asked what God was doing before the creation of the universe. This is an excellent prompt. It may appear to be funny at first, but it challenges you to think about what is time (thus, before and after), an omnipotent god’s relation with time, and the consequence that if some entity is actually outside time. People like Augustine and Newton all wrestled with this problem, each with their own motives. To build your argument, you need history, philosophy of science, and sure some theology. A whole bunch of my math and econ students got into these fields (who had shown no interest in humanities before) because of this prompt. It is just so fun to think about.

Let’ take a look at the 2026 prompts. The cashless society one I mentioned above would be a great exam question for IB or A-Level. One can examine the assumptions and think about the implications when they do not hold. But where is the debate? It is pretty straightforward what electronic payments and digital currencies can deliver and what they will cost. I’m not saying there is no controversy in this matter but resolving them largely depends on the specifics of each country. Students need only to collect and then present facts. I have read dozens of essays under this prompt. Only one found an interesting angle.

While not all prompts are like that (though many do), it seems to me that very little effort is put into making these prompts. The focus is not on making them more thoughtful but rather on creating buzz about the competition.

Reason No.3 Opaque Standards and Procedures

Parental consent, AI interview, human interview … Missing any of these steps will cost you dearly. I understand that JL is legally required to do so, but they have been doing this for years and should know it beforehand and warn the students to expect email communications. Because not everyone checks their emails every day. Certainly not high school students in China. And yes, 90% of your participants are Chinese, JL.

And then the standards. The award-winning essays published on the JL website used to be great, but now they have typos, factually false statements, and trivial arguments. I’m not saying they are bad writings. But you have a competition with 60,000 registrations. I just don’t buy it that these essays are the best you can find. At any rate, JL does not publish their criteria, nor their judging process.

So what now?

Writing competition is a great way to exercise your brain. But we have to weigh our opportunity costs. If JL continues to award bad writings, this competition will soon lose whatever credibility it still has. And you should take your business elsewhere.