I am planning to sponsor an Effective Altruism essay contest for people <18 years old.
See this document for details and prompts.

The inspiration is the Ayn Rand Institute essay contest.  
The goal is to motivate young people to learn about and get involved with EA, thus helping strengthen and spread the movement. 

Unless someone persuades me it’s a bad idea, I will run the contest starting this year.
I’m requesting help funding the prizes and (especially) judging the entries, but I am ready to do both myself.

I’m also requesting feedback on:

 

  1. Best-practices for detecting plagiarism

  2. The general idea

  3. The prompts

  4. The length

  5. The prize amounts

  6. Where to advertise this

  7. How to brand it (I want to be clear that it’s about EA, but also that it’s “unofficial” (i.e. privately organized))

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Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 10:17 AM

I found the formatting of this post difficult to read. I would recommend making it neater and clearer.

Once this idea is more developed, Students for High-Impact Charity would be happy to help advertise/promote it.

I wouldn't worry too much about detecting plagiarism. There isn't THAT much content in the EA space, and some member of a group of us would likely be able to recognize content that are repeats of things we've seen before.

Indeed. And essay competitions are not like examinations; plagiarism only needs to be detected in potential winners and can be achieved by googling fragments of the essays.