@marsexpressscorpion
As Hal_Al said, you almost certainly did not pay tax on the full amount of the scholarship in the years that you received it. You probably paid tax only on the amount that exceeded your tuition (box 5 minus box 1 on the 1098-T). You can't claim a credit or deduction for repaying money that you didn't pay tax on in the first place.
You can't just rely on the figures from the 1098-T. You have to look at your tax returns for the years that you received the scholarship and see how much was actually reported as taxable. Taxable scholarship income is included on the wages line of your Form 1040 - either line 7 or line 1, depending on the year. To the left of the amount on that line there should be the abbreviation SCH and the amount of taxable scholarship income.
Calculating the IRC 1341 credit for repayment of income that you received in more than one earlier year, and that you repay over more than one year, is going to get very complicated. You have to determine which year's taxable income you are repaying each year. I don't know what the rules are for doing that. And in any case you will have to recalculate your tax for more than one earlier year. If you get into this situation you should probably consult an accountant.
If you turn it into a loan, you should definitely consult a tax expert. It might be treated as having repaid the entire scholarship in the first year, and the loan is a separate personal loan. It's the same as if you took a loan from a bank in order to repay the scholarship. In any case, you cannot claim the interest as part of the repayment, only the actual amount of taxable scholarship income. And the loan would not qualify as a student loan (even though the interest is pegged to the Stafford loan rate), so there is no way to deduct the interest.
