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Can You Use AI Tools Like ChatGPT for Your College Essays?
11/22/2024•12 minute read
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Why Not Let AI Write Your Essays?
How To Use AI Appropriately
Future of AI in College Applications
With the emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini, it may be tempting to wonder if you could use AI when it comes to writing your college essays. Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes, you can use AI to “help” you. But, no, you don’t want to let AI write your essays for you.
“We encourage our students to use the resources that they have. So this is a resource,” says George Gatsios, director at Deltaschool AI and VP of New Ventures at Crimson Education. Gatsios has been helping Crimson students get into their top choice colleges since 2019.
“It can be used for idea generation and helping you with language — whether that's topic sentences or proofreading — and giving you an outline, especially without grammatical error, ” says Gatsios. “And if you're a non-native English speaker then it can move mountains.”
Read on to learn the best ways to make use of AI — or not — to help you write your college essays.
Why Not Let AI Write Your Essays?
When AI writing tools first launched two years ago, the buzz surrounding them in the news made it sound like AI could write as well as any human. And, given that it’s a “bot,” it is rather astounding what a truly passable job it does when you prompt it with casual writing tasks. For example, if you’re trading opinions with friends in a group text, AI writing might be easily mistaken for human writing.
But when it comes to writing college essays, it’s a different story. The college admissions officers who will be reading your essays are an audience of academics, who read and write a lot. When they’re reviewing college essays, they’re looking for something beyond generic.
This is your college application, so the stakes could not be higher. You want your essays to be not just good but great!
1. AI Is an Okay But Not Great Writer
Today’s machine learning models have been trained on a large dataset — in the case of ChatGPT, the whole Internet! — so they can generate very human-like responses to prompts. But while AI can deliver something that looks and feels like a college essay, the writing is not good enough to fool academia.
Admissions officers at top colleges have been reviewing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications every year for the better part of their careers. So they can tell when an essay is generic (AI) or genuine (real person).
Your Essays Need To Stand Out
“You need to be interesting. It cannot be generic. It cannot be something that your average person is going to write, which means the average person, if they're generating something onto a ChatGPT, then you definitely don't want to be like them.”
2. AI Makes Things Up
One of the biggest drawbacks to letting AI write your essay, is that it might write things that just aren’t true. It is really only guessing what you want to see.
Beware of AI Hallucinations
“The technical term for when AI or ChatGPT gives false information is called a hallucination. But keep in mind what's happening here is again, it is just predicting what it thinks is the most likely information. The most likely word to come next, like auto-correct. It's not trying to be accurate. It's just trying to sound correct. So you could think of it like a very confident friend that might just have a lot of false information.”
3. Colleges Use AI Detectors
Most college admissions officers can tell fairly quickly into reading an essay if it has been AI generated. In addition, the vendors that colleges use to help them deal with the whole application submission process can also put the essays through an AI detector.
Tools like GPTZero and Turnitin analyze text to determine the likelihood that it was generated by AI. These tools are not foolproof, by any means, but they can deliver a probability score. If your essay scores as highly likely AI-generated, that could cast doubt on the veracity of your entire application.
4. AI Use Might Violate the College’s Ethical Standards
Most universities, especially the Ivy Leagues and other top colleges, have honor codes, oaths, and pledges — some dating back decades or even more than a century. These oaths were originated to deter academic cheating. The pledge you sign onto goes something like this: “On my honor, I have not received any unauthorized assistance on this assignment/exam.”
Honor codes may sound old fashioned, but universities take them seriously. College students who are caught cheating or plagiarizing — or helping another student do so — may be suspended or expelled. Likewise applicants who are submitting an essay that they didn’t write themselves may be not only rejected but also blacklisted from applying to the school ever again.
It’s seriously not worth the risk.
5. Essays Are Your Chance To Show How You Think
Finally, consider the reason why universities assign personal essays. Admissions teams want to get to know you—to understand how you think and reason, how you communicate your ideas to others, and how you process your life experiences.
If you’re wondering if you could engineer AI to be a better writer by giving it better prompts, sorry to say that still would not produce a truly stellar essay, according to Gatsios. You could feed it specific information about you and your family, such as where you were born, what your parents do for a living, the sports teams that you play on, the community work that you do… but none of that is going to help AI write a truly winning essay.
Show don't tell
“It has vague and impersonal language. It doesn't give meaningful insight into who the student is. It lacks context. And again, it's generic, it's cliche. It doesn't have a voice. I don't know who the student is. If I'm reading it, It sounds like it could be generated by a computer, which it was, and it's not school-specific, which is a fatal error, especially in U.S. admissions.”
And in the final analysis, if you can’t be bothered to write your own essays, the schools that you’re applying to may very well conclude that you’re not ready for college.
The Best Ways To Use AI To “Help” You Write College Essays
So now that you know how AI can’t help you, let’s look at all the ways that it can. Getting back to the idea of using AI as a resource, there are many things that it does very well and can assist you with.
1. Brainstorming Ideas
AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are great for brainstorming ideas. If you prompt them in a thoughtful way, these tools will deliver you a whole host of concepts. You can then further refine the results with additional questions, such as: “how would you further develop this idea?” or “what are some specific examples of this?”
When used in this way, AI can definitely help jumpstart your ideation process.
“I have students in Singapore where we are trying to figure out what their capstone project will be and so we will work, the three of us — ChatGPT, my student, and myself — to generate hundreds of ideas,” says Gatsios. “Then I can help the student talk through, figure out which ideas actually work, which wouldn't work.”
2. Helping With Outlines
Another thing that AI is great at is outlining an idea. For example, say you’ve narrowed down essay concepts to your top 3-5 ideas—any of which will support the story that you are presenting about yourself. Now ask AI to outline each idea for you.
An outline can help you see the arc of your essay, how it develops, where it lands, and all the stops along the way. Would you be excited to write this essay? Does the concept feel true to you? Or would writing some of these sections feel like drudgery?
AI-generated outlines can help you hone in on an essay idea that excites and motivates you. “ChatGPT is great for anything that's just very open-ended and generative,” says Gatsios.
3. Recasting Sentences
Another thing that AI tools can be good for is rewording text. This can be useful in a number of ways. You can ask AI to:
- Rewrite an awkward sentence.
- Rephrase a paragraph to make the writing clearer
- Suggest a summary paragraph, based on your previous paragraphs.
- Edit your draft for better sentence structure and flow.
Just be sure that the end result retains your voice and personality. Don’t forget that colleges assign essays in order to get to know you, so be personal, and prove that you’re a strong fit for the school.
“You want to make sure if you were to cross out the university name in any essay that you're writing that the admissions officer would still know you're writing for that university,” says Gatsios. “You want to make sure that they know that you are talking about them, and it's not just copy and paste.”
4. Grammar, Spelling, and Synonyms
Some students use generative AI tools for help with grammar and spelling. And they can certainly help you find a better or different word for something. But if grammar and spelling are a real concern, there are other AI tools designed specifically to be grammar checkers, such as Grammarly, that are much better at this. And for spelling, Google Docs has spell check and everyone should be using it.
5. Language Translation
Where AI text writers can be very helpful is in translating text from a student’s primary language to English. It can make idiomatic expressions more colloquial and can make your writing more fluid.
“If you're a non-native English speaker then it can make a huge difference,” says Gatsios. “If you can just get something in accurate English to start with, give it to ChatGPT and it can refine it a bit and help you raise it. I use this for Mandarin. I use this for German. I will ask it to help me phrase something in a more natural way and it works fantastic.”
And as long as you have written the essay first in your primary language, expressing all your original thoughts, the translation should read as authentic and not be flagged by AI-writing detectors.
The Future of AI in College Applications
As you can see, ChatGPT and other AI tools can be a valuable resource when you’re writing college essays, but you can’t rely on them to do the writing for you.
While AI is great at generating ideas, creating outlines, rephrasing sentences, and improving grammar and spelling, it’s not a replacement for your own personal expression and critical thinking. And for now these generative AI tools are just not great enough writers to write college essays.
Things may change in the future
“Some of the changes that we may see are perhaps universities will actually drop essay requirements or have more of a focus on non-essay options, like video interviews, portfolios, and other ways of demonstrating who you are,” says Gatsios.
“The admissions officers are looking for ‘who is the student.’ And that's something that essays used to do very, very well. But now, when essays can just be generated within seconds, then that doesn't give the same type of information that it used to give to admissions officers. So I think that there may be even innovations that don't exist yet to replace the more traditional admissions essays.”
AI is a rapidly innovating technology, and there are already new and valuable applications for it in the ed-tech field. Crimson Education Strategists who work with out students, are using AI to give younger college-seeking students an early edge.
“One thing that we have is an intelligent ‘recommend’ system,” says Gatsios. “So, based off your personal situation, we understand your school contacts, your family contacts, your activities, your interests, your goals. Our system provides recommendations for what you could do to improve your profile.”
That can help a young student who may not even be thinking about colleges yet—but maybe should be.
“I work with a lot of people aged 11 to 14, meaning that if you are already getting these types of intelligent insights from the technology, along with your strategists, then you have a lot of time to explore, try new things, go deeper, let go of things that are no longer serving you, and by the time you're applying to college have one of the most standout applications of probably anyone you know. So intelligent recommendations I think is a fantastic feature that our tech side offers here at Crimson.”
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About the Contributor
George Gatsios
VP New Ventures @Crimson Education & General Director of Delta Institute
George is a seasoned college consulting expert and VP of New Ventures at Crimson Education. He leads initiatives like the Delta Institute, Crimson Alumni Network and MyCareerLaunch, focusing on innovative strategies to help students excel in competitive admissions. With extensive experience in academic advising and product development, George is dedicated to creating impactful opportunities and achieving exceptional outcomes for students worldwide.
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