International Essay Competition
Bridging Tradition and Innovation: Rethinking Pedagogy for a Transformative Future in Education
A. Competition Description
The International Essay Competition is a part of AILEC aimed at honing students’ creativity in writing essays in English at the international level. The sub-theme of the International Essay Competition in AILEC 2025 is “Bridging Tradition and Innovation: Rethinking Pedagogy for a Transformative Future in Education.”
B. General Requirements for Participant
- Participants must be active students enrolled at a higher education institution and registered on the PD-DIKTI website at https://pddikti.kemdikbud.go.id/ during the registration period until the final round. For international students, a student ID card from the respective institution must be provided.
- The competition is for individual participants.
- Participants must adhere to the entire schedule and the competition rules as stated in the competition guidelines.
- Participants are required to fill out the registration form at the link https://ailecfkip.com/regist/.
- Participants must pay the registration fee to the designated bank account.
- Submissions must not contain elements of SARA (ethnicity, religion, race, inter-group relations), religious defamation, gender harassment, radicalism, plagiarism, or have been previously submitted in other competitions.
- The submited essay will be examined by an AI detector and plagiarism checker. The maximum similarity rate is no more than 25%.
C. Preliminary Round Rules
- Participants must write an opinion essay based on the theme.
- The submitted work must be original, not a duplicate or plagiarism of others’ work, and must not have been previously entered in any similar competition at either the national or international level.
- The essay must not contain pornographic content and must not conflict with the principles of SARA (ethnicity, religion, race, and inter-group relations).
- The essay should address current issues or phenomena happening both nationally and internationally.
- The essay must follow the 5-paragraph based on template which can be accesed on the website.
- The committee will select the 10 best works based on the evaluation by the jury panel, which will then move on to the final round.
D. Preliminary Round Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria for the preliminary round of the International Essay Competition are as follows:
Table 2. Evaluation Criteria for the International Essay Competition
| No | Evaluation Criteria | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Originality: the work is the participant’s own idea, not plagiarized | 20 |
| 2 | Relevance: the work aligns with the essay theme | 15 |
| 3 | Uniqueness: the work has distinctive features and originality | 15 |
| 4 | Innovativeness: the work contains elements of novelty | 20 |
| 5 | Appeal: the work is able to capture attention | 10 |
| 6 | Usefulness: the work contributes to improving the quality of education | 10 |
| 100 |
E. Final Round Rules
- The final round of the International Essay Competition will be held online in a presentation format.
- Finalists must register their attendance online.
- The final round competition will take place with the jury panel in an online meeting room provided by the committee.
- Each finalist is allocated a maximum of 20 minutes (10 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes for Q&A with the jury team).
- The order of presentations will be explained in the online technical meeting.
- Each participant must be ready in the waiting room of the online meeting room no later than 15 minutes before the scheduled presentation time
F. Final Round Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria for the Final Round of the International Essay Competition are as follows:
Table 3. Evaluation Criteria for the Essay
| No | Evaluation Criteria | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Originality: the work is the participant’s own idea, not plagiarized | 20 |
| 2 | Relevance: the work aligns with the essay theme | 15 |
| 3 | Uniqueness: the work has distinctive features and originality | 15 |
| 4 | Innovativeness: the work contains elements of novelty | 20 |
| 5 | Appeal: the work is able to capture attention | 10 |
| 6 | Usefulness: the work contributes to improving the quality of education | 10 |
| 100 |
Table 4. Evaluation Criteria for the Presentation
| No | Evaluation Criteria | Total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Content (Understanding of essay content, arguments, and supporting data) | 30 |
| 2 | Presentation Skills (Logical organization, speaking fluency, and clarity of ideas) | 25 |
| 3 | Visual & Slide Design (Quality of slides in supproting the presentation) | 20 |
| 4 | Ability to Answer Questions (Clarity, logic, and depth of responses to judges questions) | 20 |
| 5 | Time Management (Effective use of allocated presentation time) | 5 |
| 100 |