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Should AI help Georgia students write college admissions essays?

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Thousands of high school seniors applying to one of the state’s most selective universities are tackling the same admissions essay question: “Why do you want to study your chosen major specifically at Georgia Tech?”

The best writers will respond with authenticity, personality, a solid grasp of grammar and maybe a dash of wit. Some even will consult ChatGPT for help.

And that’s just fine with Georgia Tech, to a point. The highly ranked public research school in Atlanta is among the first to issue guidance about how to use artificial intelligence as they write their essays.

ChatGPT upended classrooms when it launched last fall, forcing professors to contend with a new cheating threat and figure out how to incorporate it into courses. Now, the disruption is pounding at the admissions office door.

There’s been “deafening silence” from many schools about the use of AI in college applications, said Rick Clark , Georgia Tech’s executive director of undergraduate admission. That was all the more reason to tackle it head on as applications for fall 2024 admission opened Aug. 1.

Georgia Tech applicants can use a chatbot to brainstorm essay ideas, organize their thoughts and edit. But they shouldn’t copy and paste AI-authored paragraphs into their applications. According to Georgia Tech: “your ultimate submission should be your own.”

”We know students are using it in their own academic work in high school, and so if they’re going to, let’s give them … some guardrails,” Clark said.

Credit: Georgia Tech

The AI conundrum adds to the upheaval happening as some competitive colleges adjust policies following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in late June to end race-conscious admissions programs.

Elite institutions have taken varied approaches. The University of Michigan Law School tells applicants to write all drafts and the final product, declaring they “ought not use ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence tools.” Duke University pointed to guidelines developed to assist faculty as they think about the use of AI in classrooms, but the recommendations don’t specifically address admissions.

The Common Application, accepted by 1,000 schools including roughly two dozen in Georgia , advises colleges “to set reasonable parameters” around the use of AI, said Jenny Rickard, the organization’s president and CEO, in a written statement. Just over half of Common App schools don’t require an essay.

Credit: Riley Samples

One in 10 high school seniors and incoming college freshmen used or likely will use ChatGPT to write their college application essays, according to a recent survey of about 750 students by the online site Intelligent . Nearly all students who used AI to write their essays said the text it produced “required some or a lot of editing,” the survey found.

Riley Samples, a senior at Seckinger High School in Gwinnett County, is working on 15 essays as she applies to about seven colleges, including Georgia Tech and some in the Ivy League. The submissions will vary from short statements to 800-word pieces.

Samples thought it was interesting Georgia Tech didn’t ban AI entirely but steered applicants away from plagiarizing. She errs on the side of caution, using such programs only to check grammar.

“I think AI-generated essays cannot really capture who you are as a person,” Samples said. “When it writes, it’s very flat. It’s not very emotion-filled.”

Campus policies

Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia and the private Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven are among those addressing how to use AI in applications.

UGA advises those seeking admission to treat AI programs “like any other form of assistance, whether it is a parent, counselor or friend,” but the writing must be the applicant’s own.

Oglethorpe recognizes AI as a “powerful and convenient” tool that can assist with “language, grammar and structure” in an essay or application. But, the school stresses, “ultimately, we want to learn about you from you.”

Rebecca Sandidge, Oglethorpe’s vice president for enrollment management, said it’s too hard to police the use of AI.

“My goal is to not villainize AI,” she said. “It is a tool and students have to learn how to use it appropriately.”

Detection tools are unreliable , Clark said. Ultimately, the best way to deter students from submitting all-bot essays is to remind them that the writing won’t impress admissions readers.

Georgia College & State University hasn’t provided applicants with specific guidance regarding AI, a spokeswoman said. Neither has the private Emory University, though a spokeswoman said “we expect applicants to write their essays themselves.”

Spelman College also doesn’t have a policy forbidding the use of AI in admissions essays. Ingrid Hayes, senior vice president for enrollment management, said in a statement that if AI-generated text is suspected, it “may raise doubts about the students’ academic potential in the holistic application review.”

Abby Hyken, a senior at Atlanta’s Midtown High School who plans to apply to about a dozen colleges, has used ChatGPT to brainstorm debate team arguments, where it provided a helpful starting point. But the text it generates is emotionless and “not that good.” She has not turned to it for the 20 or more college essays on her to-do list.

Hyken’s biggest writing challenge is showcasing her personality and how she’d fit into a school “without sounding too cliche.”

Ethical concerns

At Seckinger , a school that intertwines artificial intelligence into courses, students are accustomed to thinking about its ethical uses.

Noelle Halverson, a senior, experimented with ChatGPT when a teacher encouraged her class to try it on a creative writing assignment. Halverson used it to flesh out plot details and to look for a period-appropriate name for an 18th-century character.

Using a chatbot to help with college essays, though, doesn’t feel right, she said. “It wouldn’t be me at all.”

The college search is “a daunting task,” said Seckinger junior Lauren Chiru-Danzer, who has used ChatGPT to research schools in the Northeast with good law programs.

“We are constantly discussing the ethical implications of AI,” she said. “We have deemed it ethical to use AI as almost like a brainstorming partner, as a way to get ideas started. But it is not ethical to copy and paste what AI has given to you because it is plagiarism.”

College counselors at the Buckhead-based Access Test Prep & Tutoring help students brainstorm ideas for essays, edit and proofread. Co-founder Elaine Rosenblum said teenagers communicate in smartphone “text-speak” and learn formulaic writing in high school. But those skills don’t exactly translate into crafting strong college essays, which should capture a student’s personality and a reader’s attention.

So far, AI writing can’t replicate nuance and emotion, said Rosenblum. Relying on ChatGPT is “a very dangerous proposition” unless colleges clearly state what’s allowed.

“I wouldn’t test the waters,” she said. “I think it’s lazy. It’s the opposite of what a college wants you to do. Why risk it?”

Rosenblum draws a distinction between students who use AI and those who hire advisers to help them apply to college.

“Someone who is doing college counseling that has integrity will not write the essay for the student,” she said.

‘Paralysis of the blinking cursor’

For first-generation students or those from rural communities who don’t have access to college coaching, AI isn’t an equalizer, but it might help democratize the application process, Clark said. Georgia Tech’s guidance notes that “AI could be a helpful collaborator, particularly when you do not have access to other assistance to help you complete your application.”

And while essays are a valuable component of a student’s application, it’s exceedingly rare to admit or deny someone based on those writings, Clark said. Grades, academic rigor, test scores, and involvement outside of class are critical to decision-makers, he said.

Credit: Ben Gray

Still, many students get stuck on essays. Clark calls it the “paralysis of the blinking cursor” and said admissions departments should do what they can to “de-stress the process.” That’s where ChatGPT can chip in.

“It gets them throwing out some stuff, getting started, thinking about things, and then realizing, ‘Well, that’s not exactly the way I want to put it. Or, that’s not really my voice,’” he said.

Students aren’t the only ones figuring out how to use AI. Admissions officers are exploring how it could work for them too.

Last year, humans read more than 52,000 undergraduate applications to Georgia Tech. They’ll do so again this year, but the school is testing the use of AI in its own process. The school plans to run applications through a computer program at the end of the admissions cycle. Officials will check how the program scores submissions compared to humans, who will still decide who gets in, Clark said.

“We have to find ways to learn and to be more efficient and to spend our time on what really matters,” he said.

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About the Author

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Students are using AI in their university applications. This admissions director says that's OK

Rick clark says it's ok for students to use chatgpt to write — as long as they take right approach.

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Many high school students are sitting down to write their post-secondary admission essays this fall — a task that may be a lot easier thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence.

Students now have wide access to ChatGPT, an AI-powered chat bot that generates text based on prompts.

While this has some school officials alarmed, Rick Clark, executive director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, says turning to technology   is a"natural human response." 

"We're not always so comfortable with the unfamiliar and the new, and it can take a little while to embrace that," he told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. 

In fact, Clark says the technology helps alleviate some of the nervous energy surrounding college admissions essays. 

This summer, as educators grapple with how to handle AI , Clark and his colleagues took on the personas of high school students to test out how ChatGPT could help students write their essays. He told Köksal what he learned. Here is part of their conversation. 

When your colleagues ...  all took on high school personas to do this ChatGPT college application challenge or try to navigate how it all works, what personas did you all take on?

We had somebody in our office who pretended to be a competitive swimmer, but for a club team in the area and also for their high school. This is somebody who did not swim herself but had aspirations of it and was intrigued.

My daughter is a seventh grader, so not necessarily a high school student, but she's very involved with musical theatre, and so that was my persona. 

And then as you might gather, Georgia Tech gets a lot of Type-A students and so we have a lot of Eagle Scouts and kids who are then really involved in the scouting community. So we also used an Eagle Scout prototype. 

And what was the verdict in the end? 

First of all, I found it to be super helpful. ChatGPT, by the way, is pretty friendly.… It basically says, "Sure, I'd love to help, here's a step-by-step guide," and sort of walks you through what to consider.

It sort of shows how it's going to lay out. 

I know other people in the same position as you across the U.S. are maybe not nodding in agreement. They're really worried about this technology. 

I look at this as an absolute opportunity. It's free. It's accessible to students in a way that, oftentimes, many students don't have an adult right there for them. Or other students have the ability to pay someone to give them feedback and give them that dialogue essentially. And that's what, in many ways, these open AIs are providing. 

Universities warn of penalties as students increasingly turn to AI

There's also concern that people are going to be cutting and pasting for an essay that should be very personal. 

That's right, and at Georgia Tech, after sort of talking with some professors who are real experts in this area and talking to our provost, [we] ultimately learn[ed] that, first of all, this idea of reverse-AI, as one of our [computer science] professors said, is a pipe dream… you're not going to know with certainty if a student used AI. 

Really what we came to was: We know kids are using this. My own teenagers in my house are using this. How can we be instructive? And that is our statement on AI, just what you said — [if] it's not going to be used to copy and paste … but brainstorming and editing and refining, there's real value there. 

• FRONT BURNER ChatGPT in university: useful tool or cheating hack?
• AS IT HAPPENS Author says 'AI-generated' books were published under her name. Amazon wouldn't take them down

Are you concerned there's too much grey area? 

I am, in that it has been very quiet from my colleagues around the country. Maybe that will change, but this summer when I was at conferences both of larger public universities and sometimes more selective private universities, people were not ready to put out statements. 

Of course that silence or that absence of information is going to create some confusion or perhaps some anxiety, so that's why we wanted to kind of lead on this. I do see some other schools now starting to come on board, and I'm hopeful that here while we're still in the early part of the fall, more will. The best we can do is tell the students that we are recruiting for Georgia Tech and we would like you to think of this even more broadly. Here is a reasonable approach that we think can be helpful. 

When you get that pile [of essays] and there's someone you can tell is a cut and paste … that's a no-go for you?

At the end of the day, a good essay, and what every school will tell you [is], we're looking for your voice. We're looking for details. We're looking for specifics. We're looking for a unique take on your story.

ChatGPT doesn't really give you that. But it gets you moving. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keena Alwahaidi is a reporter and associate producer for CBC. She's interested in news, arts/culture and human interest stories. Follow her on Twitter at @keenaalwahaidi

Interview with Rick Clark produced by Sarah Jackson

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The Impact of AI on College Admissions

What’s covered:, can i use ai to write my college essays, can i use ai to help me with my college essays, can i use ai to write my activities list, will my teachers use ai to write my letters of recommendation, will colleges use ai checkers.

Since late 2022, the prevalence and influence of generative AI technologies have significantly increased across a range of industries, including higher education. The implications of generative AI are particularly complex and multifaceted in the context of college admissions, where the authenticity and uniqueness of student applications are crucial.

Admissions officers’ traditional metrics and methods for assessing applicants’ originality and personal voice are coming under pressure as AI tools get more sophisticated at producing creative content, from essays to artistic works. Over time, educational institutions might need to pivot to new methods to maintain the objectivity and fairness of their selection standards. The role of AI in college admissions will undoubtedly continue to evolve, but some of the most common questions do already have clear answers.

The shortest answer to this would, unsurprisingly, be no. 

The primary objective of a college essay is to present a personal narrative that reflects your identity. Universities need to hear this story from you to fully understand your unique identity, experiences, and points of view. If you use AI to write your college essay, there’s no way to successfully do these things. 

The problem is, AI creates content that may be well-written, but lacks the genuine essence of your voice and life experiences. The technology draws on what’s already out there, and so is intrinsically incapable of capturing and conveying your unique experiences, feelings, and realizations about yourself. Essentially, AI-written college essays by definition lack the human touch and authenticity that define the very best college essays . Remember, these essays are more than just words on a page—they’re your primary opportunity to explain to admissions officers who you are at a fundamental level.

Furthermore, there’s a chance that AI-generated essays will be detected thanks to colleges’ increasing development of AI detection tools (more on this later), which would likely lead to your application automatically being rejected. Schools expect you to write your essays yourself, and using AI is just as dishonest as having a friend or sibling write your essay for you.

Some colleges have already taken the step of stating explicitly that they expect students to write their essays themselves. The following statement is from Haverford College, just before students enter their supplemental essays on the Common App: 

“Good writing is a process, and there are many resources you might use as you craft your responses, including asking someone you trust to review your work and offer feedback or using generative artificial intelligence to brainstorm your response. But please know that what is most important to us is to hear your voice and ideas. Your voice matters to us, and hearing it in your writing will help us better understand who you are and imagine who you would be at Haverford.”

This statement highlights that while AI may be able to help you with your brainstorming or other elements of your drafting process, the finished product must have the integrity of your own voice/personality. Colleges aren’t trying to be mean; they genuinely seek to understand the unique individual behind your application, and AI, while a helpful tool, cannot possibly convey the depth and authenticity of your personal story. 

In conclusion, even though AI has uses, writing college essays is not one of them. Your essays must accurately reflect who you are, and that is a task only you can complete.

While you shouldn’t use AI to actually write your essay, AI can be a useful tool for preliminary brainstorming or research during your college essay writing process. For example, it can save you time browsing college websites as you prepare to write a “Why School?” essay , by generating lists of programs or clubs that are relevant to your interests at particular colleges. Cross-referencing this information with the official college websites is essential, though, as academic and extracurricular offerings are subject to change. 

Even though AI can be useful in these early phases, it’s crucial to remember that you must be the one to explain how the activities AI told you about align with your past experiences, or how you see yourself using them to fulfill your goals for college. In other words, AI can give you some of the ingredients, but you have to do the cooking.

If you’re looking to generate a rough draft using AI, ChatGPT is one tool you can utilize. The process of incorporating a tool like ChatGPT into your writing process has 5 steps:

1. Brainstorming for Essay Topics

• Initial Ideas: Share with ChatGPT any preliminary ideas or experiences that you would like to discuss in your college essay. These could be noteworthy experiences, accomplishments, or facets of your personality.
• Finding Themes: The core of your essay may be formed by interacting with ChatGPT to find interesting themes or lessons from life in your stories.

2. Structuring Your College Essay

• Creating an Outline: Ask ChatGPT to create a structured outline for you. Make sure it has a logical opening, body paragraphs that explore your experiences or best traits, and a conclusion that connects to your main points.
• Organization: Verify that the outline presents your development or insights in a clear, easy-to-follow way.

3. Customizing to Reflect Your Personal Voice

• Adaptation: Adjust ChatGPT’s suggested phrasings to align with how you yourself would express those ideas, and make sure the details provided about your experiences are both accurate and the best ones to communicate your point.
• Connection to the Prompt: Make sure the ideas are presented in a way that clearly answers the prompt, rather than as a vague narrative that could be responding to anything.

4. Enhancing Authenticity and Creativity

• The Hook: Crafting a vivid, engaging hook is something you’ll likely have to do on your own, as only you have access to your full treasure chest of experiences, and so only you can determine which one would make for the strongest start to your essay.
• Personalization of Goals: Many students have similar goals for college, which is totally normal, but you want to make sure you’re describing them in a way that’s truly unique to you. Being reliant on ChatGPT when you’re spelling out what you want to do in college will likely cause your application to sound the same as everyone else’s.

5. Applying Personal Insight and Ethical Considerations

• True Narrative: As you work towards a final draft, make sure the story is being told in a way that feels authentic to you. ChatGPT will never know all the details of what has happened in your life, nor how your experiences have impacted you. Only you do, so verify that the heart of the story reflects your actual emotions about and reflections on your life.
• Respect for Integrity: Read back over your essay, and honestly ask yourself if you did the bulk of the writing yourself. If the answer is no, you’re unfortunately not done just yet—refer back to the steps above to ensure you’ve done the necessary personalization to your AI-generated rough draft.

Remember that there are other AI tools, like Google’s Bard, emerging in the generative content arena, so these tips for writing a college admissions essay are not just applicable to ChatGPT. Select an AI tool that you are comfortable using, and treat it as an aid for brainstorming and organizing your essay, while still taking the time to describe the distinctive human elements of your story yourself.

Using AI for your activities list in college applications can be beneficial, as this list exists to provide a concise and factual summary of your extracurricular involvement, roles, and accomplishments, rather than the deeper personal reflection of full-length essays. Particularly given the challenge of wrestling with strict character limits, such as 150 characters on the Common App, AI can assist you in creating succinct yet impactful descriptions. 

It’s crucial, however, to ensure that the AI-generated content accurately reflects your experiences and effectively highlights your skills and achievements. So, like with your essays, fact-checking and editing are key steps in this process. While AI can facilitate the drafting of your activities list, it’s important to double check that the final version is an authentic depiction of you extracurricular involvement. Remember, AI doesn’t actually know what you did, only you do.

Given their heavy workloads, some teachers may use AI to help them write recommendation letters. Even before the rise of AI, educators have traditionally relied on rec letter templates for efficiency, as these letters, while personalized, typically have a relatively standardized format. So, writing an initial draft of a rec letter is definitely a suitable task for AI.

Students should, however, have confidence that their teachers will personalize these letters, to ensure that they reflect unique insights into their own abilities and character. Definitely don’t ask your teachers whether they’re going to use AI to write your letter—you may come across as accusatory or even outright rude.

Overall, teachers and counselors can benefit greatly from tools such as CollegeVine’s AI Rec Letter Assistant , which quickly generates personalized, editable drafts of recommendation letters, tailored to each student using their specific data and adapted to match the educator’s unique writing style. But these tools are just to streamline the letter-writing process—your teachers are going to read them over to make sure they’re also incorporating a personal touch.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether colleges will use AI checkers, because practices for every element of admissions vary by institution, and many are still adapting to the rapidly evolving AI technologies out there. However, while you have no way of knowing for sure whether or not a given college is using AI checking technology, it shouldn’t matter, as you simply shouldn’t use AI to write your essays. 

In addition to all of the reasons given above for why you should write your essays yourself, if you’re unable to personally invest in writing a supplemental essay for a school, you may want to take a step back and ask yourself how genuine your interest really is in that particular institution.

How to Get Feedback on Your Essays

Need some quick feedback on your essays? Consider using CollegeVine’s free AI essay reviewer, Ivy, for ethical AI assistance in refining your essays. Ivy can give you immediate feedback on how to improve the structure and content of your essays. 

However, human feedback is equally important, as AI may not fully comprehend the nuances of your writing. Check out CollegeVine’s Peer Essay Review tool to receive free critiques from other students who can provide valuable feedback on your work. This tool also allows you to improve your own writing skills by reviewing your peers’ essays.

CollegeVine also provides access to college admissions experts for more specialized advice regarding essays. These advisors have a proven track record of assisting students in refining their essays and submitting successful applications to selective universities, and will increase your chances of getting into your dream college by giving you personalized, insightful feedback on your writing.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

1 in 3 College Applicants Used AI for Essay Help. Did They Cheat?

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Last spring, Makena, then a high school senior, was deep into cranking out some 70 essays for 20 college applications when her creativity started to wane.

So, she turned to a high-tech brainstorming partner: artificial intelligence.

One essay prompt asked Makena to describe a class she’d want to teach if she were a college professor. “I had no idea,” said Makena, who asked to be identified only by her first name to speak candidly about the admissions process. “I had never thought about it.”

She put her intended major and some favorite topics into an AI tool, which spit out a list of potential courses. Makena selected one and crafted her essay around it, without any further AI assistance.

In Makena’s mind, this wasn’t cheating.

“I wrote my own essays, 100 percent,” she said. After all, she could have found the same information on Google or by picking up a course catalogue. AI was just more efficient.

About a third of high school seniors who applied to college in the 2023-24 school year acknowledged using an AI tool for help in writing admissions essays, according to research released this month by foundry10 , an organization focused on improving learning.

About half of those students—or roughly one in six students overall—used AI the way Makena did, to brainstorm essay topics or polish their spelling and grammar. And about 6 percent of students overall—including some of Makena’s classmates, she said—relied on AI to write the final drafts of their essays instead of doing most of the writing themselves.

Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of students admitted to Harvard University’s class of 2027 paid a private admissions consultant for help with their applications .

The use of outside help, in other words, is rampant in college admissions, opening up a host of questions about ethics, norms, and equal opportunity.

Top among them: Which—if any—of these students cheated in the admissions process?

For now, the answer is murky.

Colleges permit students to use pricey admissions coaches . But they are mostly silent on how AI can be used in crafting essays.

That’s created “this ethical gray area that students and [high school] counselors don’t have any guidance” on how to navigate, said Jennifer Rubin, a senior researcher at foundry10 and the lead author the report.

A ‘double standard’ on college admissions

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have put a high-tech twist on decades-old questions of fairness in the college admissions process.

The system has “never been a level playing field,” Rubin said, citing the advantages that mostly benefit wealthier students, such as SAT tutors, paid college admissions coaches, and savvy, college-educated parents. “I think [AI] is just complicating it a little bit more because it’s a tool that’s readily available to everyone.”

To get a sense of the public’s perceptions on AI in college admissions, foundry10 included an experimental portion in its survey.

Participants reviewed an identical portion of a college essay. But one group was instructed that the applicant had help from ChatGPT in brainstorming ideas, refining content, and polishing the final draft—essentially the same tasks Makena used AI for.

Another group was told the applicant got assistance with the same parts of the writing process, from a paid college admissions coach. A third group was informed that the student worked entirely alone.

Participants rated the applicant who used ChatGPT as less authentic, less ethical, and less likable than the student who paid for professional help. (The student who worked solo got the highest ratings.)

Rubin perceives a “double standard” at work.

A student who can pay “thousands of dollars to someone who has the knowledge of how a [particular college] works and what’s needed or wanted in a college admissions essay is going to have an undue advantage,” she said.

College admissions coaching services typically cost from $60 to $349 per hour, according to data cited in Rubin’s report from Prepmaven, an admissions-preparation company.

The website of one such service, Ivy College Essay , advertises its Harvard connections. For between $1,500 and $4,800, depending on the number of applications, students receive help in brainstorming topics and “extensive written notes, comments, and guidance, focusing on both content and structure,” according to the site.

“We go back and forth as many times as needed until we have a very strong and solid Ivy League college application!” the company promises.

Assistance from ChatGPT on similar tasks “probably isn’t going to be as strong” as what such a service offers, Rubin said. “But it might provide students some form of feedback that they might not be able to get in their lives because they don’t have parents or caregivers” who have the savvy to help.

These issues are especially personal for Rubin, a first-generation college graduate who attended a private high school on scholarship. She had the help of her school counselors in applying to college.

But that assistance couldn’t make up for the gap between Rubin and many of her peers with highly educated parents, who could offer all sorts of support, she said.

Big questions on AI use go mostly unanswered by colleges

For now, high school counselors aren’t sure what to tell their students when it comes to how AI can be ethically used in the admissions process.

“My seniors have come to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got to write an essay about this. Where do I even start?’ Or ‘is it OK if I use ChatGPT?’” said Melissa Millington, a school counselor in Missouri. “I just really hit on, you cannot pass that off as your own work, because that’s not ethical.”

But, like Rubin, she sees some possibility for the technology in crafting applications that stop short of making AI a sole, uncredited ghost writer.

“If you are going to use it to get a starting point, that’s totally fine,” she said she’s told students. “Or if you want to write your essay, and then put it in there and ask it to clean [the] grammar,” that’s likely fair game.

While most colleges and universities are silent on the AI issue, some individual institutions have given applicants the green light to use AI in a limited fashion.

One of the country’s most prestigious institutions focusing on science, math, engineering and technology, CalTech, tells prospective students that it’s unethical to copy and paste an essay written entirely by generative AI. But it is acceptable to use AI to brainstorm or check grammar and spelling, the college says.

Georgia Polytechnical Institute, another highly regarded STEM-focused university, has a similar policy .

“If you choose to utilize AI-based assistance … we encourage you to take the same approach you would when collaborating with people,” the school’s website says. “Use it to brainstorm, edit, and refine your ideas.”

But for other colleges, any use of AI is unacceptable, at least officially. Brown University, for instance, cites its fraud policy and tells applicants that the use of AI is “not permitted under any circumstances.”

‘It always been an honor system’

Brown and other institutions have no real way of enforcing those policies, Rubin said.

AI detectors are notoriously unreliable. And they are disproportionately likely to flag writing by students who are not native English speakers, even if they didn’t use AI.

In fact, Kristin Woelfel, a policy counsel specializing in equity in civic technology for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit organization that aims to shape technology policy, has gone so far as to say the detectors have the potential to violate students’ civil rights .

It doesn’t really matter if colleges have guidelines that prohibit AI use, Rubin said, because there’s no way to check on what kind of assistance an applicant received, human or not.

“It’s always been on the honor system,” she said.

Colleges that haven’t outlined their policies on AI in the application process are ignoring the obvious—and making life harder for high school counselors and their students, said Maritza Cha, who worked as a school counselor in Southern California for nearly a decade and has taught high school counseling as an adjunct professor.

“We’re at the point of either you can kind of put your head down in the sand and pretend it’s not happening, which is not realistic,” Cha said. “Or you can just acknowledge that they’re using some kind of AI” in the admissions process.

Counselors can model proper use of AI in the college search

While much of the work in setting clear guidelines needs to happen at the college level, there are steps high school educators can take.

Rubin believes that if counselors and teachers are really thinking about leveling the playing field between first-generation college students from low-income families and their peers, it might be helpful to show how generative AI can ethically guide the college admissions process.

For instance, students could put areas of study they are interested in and a desired geographic region into a tool like ChatGPT and ask for recommendations on where to apply.

“Generative AI can provide them some really concrete information,” Rubin said. Even though they should check that data against more accurate sources, it can help a student narrow their search.

Students can even have a “conversation back and forth” with AI if they don’t have access to a college counselor at school who can meet with them consistently, she said.

And they can model how to use AI to spur their creativity or proofread final drafts, without crossing the line into wholesale cheating, she said.

But, ultimately, high school educators and college officials need to have conversations about what responsible use of AI looks like, including in crafting college applications, Rubin said.

In Rubin’s view, those discussions should acknowledge that many students already have access to other types of help—whether that’s from professional consultants or parents and older siblings familiar with the process of applying to college.

Makena, for instance, thinks she can write a stronger, more personal essay than anything ChatGPT could cook up. She didn’t feel the need to pay a private counselor either, since she wanted to rely on her own voice as much as possible.

She did, however, have a low-tech, presumably cost-free assistant: Her father, who edited all 70-plus of her essays.

A version of this article appeared in the August 14, 2024 edition of Education Week as 1 in 3 College Applicants Used AI For Essay Help. Did They Cheat?

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College application season is here. So is the struggle to find out if AI wrote students’ essays

With the growing use of AI, campus officials are trying to set clear guidelines for college application essays.

Artificial intelligence might be the new frontier in technology, but Toby Reed, a senior at Fremont High in Oakland, has no doubts about whether to harness its powers — at least on his college application essay.

“No. It’s blatantly plagiarizing,” said Reed, who, like hundreds of thousands of other California seniors, is in the process of applying to colleges. “It’s bad enough stealing content, but with ChatGPT you’re not even stealing from a real person.”

In the first application season since generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become widely available, colleges and high schools are grappling with the ethical and practical implications of text-writing technology.

“We can’t pretend it away,” said Josh Godinez, a high school counselor at Centennial High in Riverside County and former president of the California Association of School Counselors. Students are using AI on their college application essays, whether grown-ups like it or not, he said.

Most school leaders and college experts that CalMatters interviewed agree that students who rely exclusively on AI to write their college application essays are violating academic integrity rules and are subject to having their applications rejected. But there’s plenty of nuance in the details, and guidelines can be vague and confusing.

“It’s bad enough stealing content, but with ChatGPT you’re not even stealing from a real person.”

The California Department of Education encourages districts to explore the potential benefits of AI, particularly in computer science curriculum or as part of broader lessons in media literacy. But it leaves decisions about AI use in classrooms up to school districts — many of which have policies prohibiting plagiarism, which could include the use of AI for writing essays, for example.

That means most students applying to college now are at least familiar with the ethics of using technology to write their essays for them.

“We want our students to understand how AI works and how to leverage it, but also understand the ethical implications,” said Katherine Goyette, the state education department’s computer science coordinator. “AI is here. We need to teach students and educators how to learn with it, and learn about it.”

And even if colleges prohibit essays whose provenance is generative AI, nabbing a student for robotic plagiarism is an imprecise science. The company behind ChatGPT shut down its own tool for detecting text generated by AI in July, citing a high rate of human-derived text that the application flagged as written by AI. One scholar in a Wired article noted that even a 1% rate of false-positives is inexcusable, because for every 1,000 essays, that’s 10 students who could be accused of an academic theft they didn’t commit.

JR Gonzalez, chief technology officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, noted that no AI detection tool is 100% accurate. And AI itself can occasionally produce wrong information.

Varying policies on AI in admissions essays

Common App, the college application tool used by 1,000 institutions nationwide , in August included a restriction on “substantive” AI use in college admissions applications as part of its fraud policy . The addition was a response to feedback from member colleges and an internal desire to “keep up with the changing technologies,” a spokesperson wrote.

What does “substantive” mean? Common App’s CEO, Jenny Rickard, said there’s no definition, and that’s intentional, writing in an email that “we will evaluate the totality of the circumstances to determine if a student truly intended to misrepresent content generated by AI technology as their own work.”

Common App doesn’t determine whether students are being honest — that’s up to the member colleges to figure out. But if Common App concludes that a student plagiarized, that student’s account may be terminated and Common App will notify the campuses to which the student applied, Rickard wrote.

University of Southern California, which uses the Common App exclusively to process its admissions and is a top choice for Common App applicants , is less lenient.

“Were we to learn that an applicant had used generative AI for any part of their application, their application would be immediately rejected,” the university said in a written statement. The school turned down CalMatters’ request to interview an admissions official.

But the stern words lack teeth. The highly selective private university isn’t employing any AI-detection software, a spokesperson wrote.

The University of California and its nine undergraduate campuses permit students to use generative AI in admissions essays in limited form, such as “advice on content and editing,” but “content and final written text must be their own,” its written policy states . Unlike the state’s private campuses, UC operates its own admissions portal.

But the UC Office of the President, which turned down a CalMatters request for an interview on the topic, wouldn’t specify how it detects whether students relied on AI tools to write their essays. “UC conducts regular screenings to verify the integrity of the responses, may request authentication of the content or writing as the student’s, and will take action when it is determined that the integrity of the response is compromised,” including plagiarism through AI, its guidance states.

A UC spokesperson, Ryan King, suggested students are wasting their effort by relying on AI generative tools, writing “it would be more work for them to try building a strong ChatGPT prompt than it would be to develop their own original responses to the (essay questions).”

Campuses that responded to CalMatters indicated that while generative AI can be a source to spitball ideas, structure an outline and generally shape the essay-writing process, the tools are no match for human voices to communicate nuance and how an applicant’s life experiences tie into the various essay questions. There’s also limited room for the banal writing AI tools typically generate — the Common App essay response can’t exceed 650 words while UC’s four essays are capped at 350 words each.

Pomona College, a highly selective institution that accepts applications through the Common App, has no formal policy on AI use in admissions essays, though its director of admissions thinks it’s “not very good at nuance, personalization or helping a student communicate in their authentic voice, which is what we’re really looking for when we evaluate an application,” wrote Adam Sapp in an email.

“The value of a 350-word response on topics like leadership, resiliency, or creativity may be diminished if it doesn’t directly reflect a student’s own experiences,” noted UC Riverside’s director of undergraduate admissions, Veronica Zendejas, in email.

Responses from Stanford University and UC Berkeley relayed similar sentiments.

“We want our students to understand how AI works and how to leverage it, but also understand the ethical implications.”

Zendejas offers practical tips for crafting anxiety-inducing essay responses, telling prospective students to “write in clear, straightforward prose, much like they would in an interview or a conversation. This approach should alleviate concerns about the need for AI tools to assist in writing their responses.”

University of San Francisco, another Common App partner, won’t use AI detection software for college applications because the campus doesn’t think it’s necessary. The full picture of a student’s fit on campus comes into view from their grades, letters of recommendation and other aspects of the holistic application review, said the university’s associate provost who oversees undergraduate admissions, Sherie Gilmore-Cleveland, in an interview.

Gilmore-Cleveland said after a student’s high school academics, the essay is the second-most important factor in a student’s application at University of San Francisco. But in her 20-plus years of working in admissions, she’s never encountered a student with weak grades and a strong essay who was admitted. Other admissions officers have also questioned how much of a boost an essay gives an applicant.

However, a student with good grades and an awful essay may be rejected from the university if they’re trying to apply for a competitive major. The student may be re-routed to another major, or just be rejected outright — it’s a case-by-case basis, Gilmore-Cleveland said.

Using generative AI is easy

But not everyone applying to college with an essay component is a good writer, said Jeffrey Hancock, a Stanford University professor of communication . “They’ll probably find that they do better when they use a tool like this,” Hancock said of applicants using generative AI.

Hancock said students with no coding experience can train a tool like ChatGPT, especially the latest premium version, to generate strong essays, in a process known as fine-tuning.

First, an applicant pastes essays of students who were admitted to top colleges into an AI tool. The student tells the tool to analyze the essays for positive traits. Then, the applicant pastes essays from students who were rejected from schools and prompts the AI to look for patterns to avoid. Along the way, the student confirms the AI tool is understanding the task. “Do you understand the difference between the two, and it would say ‘yes, I’ve found this pattern versus that pattern,’” Hancock said.

Finally, the student prompts the tool to generate a rough draft based on those findings.

Hancock co-published a peer-reviewed study in March showing that humans can detect AI-written work about as accurately as predicting a coin toss — meaning poorly. And “as you build detectors, the AI gets better,” Hancock said, adding that he anticipates an arms race between detection and evasion.

And while generative AI may be the latest cause célèbre, it’s part of a long line of help students have been able to access for decades. Teachers, counselors and family members offer students writing support. So can pricey tutors, who — even if they’re ethically opposed to writing an essay for a student — can still provide tailored coaching in a way that’s inaccessible to most low-income students.

“As you build detectors, the AI gets better,” Hancock said, adding that he anticipates an arms race between detection and evasion.

The debate over AI use in college applications reflects a larger trend in classrooms. Educators are deciding how to adapt to artificial intelligence, especially as it improves and becomes more ubiquitous. Some districts have yet to address the issue, while others have adopted comprehensive guidelines promoting its benefits and warning of its dangers.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education held an AI symposium last summer for hundreds of educators, and is crafting guidelines for the 80 districts it oversees. Despite AI’s obvious risks, the most obvious benefits, according to Gonzalez, are for teachers and administrators: creating lesson plans, making master schedules, tracking student achievement and attendance, writing grant applications and even crafting state-mandated accountability plans.

Christine Elgersma, senior editor for learning content strategy at Common Sense Media, a research and advocacy nonprofit, suggests that schools move forward thoughtfully as they create AI policies and include students in the discussion. Students should understand the ethical implications, the biases that exist in AI algorithms, the potential for misinformation and the privacy risks.

“Since college essays are so personal, it brings up a question of privacy,” Elgersma said. “For example, pieces of your story could turn up folded into another student’s AI-generated essay.”

Students should also understand the value of learning to write, and think, independently, “developing your own ideas and expressing yourself in words, with clarity and profundity and a flair that’s your own,” she said.

Tara Sorkhabi, a senior at Monte Vista High School in Danville, said her teachers have been clear in discouraging, if not outright banning, the use of AI for writing assignments. While Sorkhabi has found AI useful in studying chemistry, for example, she does not believe students should use it for college application essays.

“Admissions officers wouldn’t know who they’re accepting. They’d basically be admitting a bot,” she said.

She also thinks that allowing AI in college application essays is unfair to students who toil for weeks perfecting their own essays without the help of machines.

Reed, the Fremont High senior, said students who over-rely on AI for writing assignments are ultimately cheating themselves, because they’re not learning valuable skills like research, expression and critical thinking.

“It’s your future,” Reed said, noting that students should take advantage of opportunities to expand their minds, not use short-cuts. “You can’t plagiarize in school. You can’t do it at work. People like AI because it’s quick and easy, but it’s not good.”

CalMatters  is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. 

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Georgia Tech Admission Blog

Category: essays, embracing essay writing authentechly  .

This week we welcome Senior Admission Advisor, Julissa Ortiz, to the blog. Welcome, Julissa!

As the fall season approaches, I eagerly anticipate the cozy evenings ahead… bundling up with a blanket, watching my favorite movies, and preparing for the holidays. It’s my favorite time of year!  

But there’s something else I love about this season: as an admission counselor at Georgia Tech, I get to read the stories of so many incredible students through their college essays. This will be my third year reviewing applications, and I must say, it’s a privilege. Every year I’m amazed by the courage, creativity, and authenticity that so many students bring to their writing.  

I know this process can feel overwhelming. But remember, your essay is more than a task we require… it’s a unique opportunity to speak directly to us! As seniors everywhere begin to tackle their college essays, I’d like to offer some advice to help you shine through your writing.  

Find Your Voice  

To find your voice, use language that feels natural to you. There’s no need to overcomplicate things with fancy words. Read your essay out loud and ask yourself, “Is this what I would actually say if I were speaking to an admission counselor in person? Does it sound like me?” Getting feedback from someone else can also help, but trust your instincts—you know yourself best! Don’t forget, we’re genuinely trying to get a glimpse of who you are, so don’t hold back or overthink. Be authentic and let your true self come through.  

Share Personal Stories  

Think about the experiences that have left a mark on you: maybe it was overcoming an unforeseen challenge, discovering a passion that excites you, or having a conversation that shifted your perspective. Big or small, these moments reveal who you are beneath the surface. When you write with honesty and self-reflection, you invite the reader to see the world through your eyes.  

Don’t Overlook the Supplemental Essay  

Beyond the Common App essay, Georgia Tech asks for a supplemental essay to understand how you might fit within our campus community. Our motto is “Progress and Service,” and we’re looking for students who are not only excited about what they can gain here but also about what they can contribute.  

Think about how Tech aligns with your goals and passions. Reflect on how you see yourself engaging with our community, both in and out of the classroom. This is your chance to show us why Georgia Tech is the place for you—and why you’re a perfect fit for us. Be thoughtful, be specific, and most importantly, be yourself! Share how you see yourself living our values and contributing to our dynamic campus life.  

Be Your AuthenTECH Self!  

At the end of the day, what’s the key to writing a great college essay for Georgia Tech? Be your AuthenTECH self! Your story matters, and we can’t wait to hear it. So, grab your favorite fall treat, take a deep breath, and start brainstorming your thoughts. We can’t wait to meet you through your words and discover the unique perspective you’ll bring to our Yellow Jacket family.  

Julissa Ortiz has dedicated her career to supporting students. She joined Georgia Tech in 2022 as a Senior Admission Advisor within the First-Year Team, bringing her experience and enthusiasm for fostering college access. As a first-generation, small-town student herself, Julissa is deeply committed to expanding educational opportunities for all. She also serves as an advisor for the Women’s Recruitment Team, a dynamic student organization on campus focused on supporting prospective women, while creating an empowered community among members. 

Seniors, Can We ChatGPT?

Last week I wrote a piece for rising juniors about how they could consider using generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT and others in order to assist in their college search. The takeaway is that these tools are helpful for brainstorming, iterating, and sparking thought and reactions, which is essentially what the college search, application, and selection process should be.   

The responses I received via email and direct message were… mixed.  

A few were extremely appreciative– another good resource and a helpful way to open students’ minds to choices and options.  

Others were- let’s just say- less appreciative. Everything from references to an “unchecked Pandora’s Box” to some straight up vitriol. Welcome to the world of blogs and social media.  

Here is what we know  

• The Common Application does not have a policy for students on using Artificial Intelligence. In fact, if you enter “AI” into their platform’s search, only a list of colleges come up: American International College, College of St. Scholastica, The Citadel, Colby College, Lawrence University. FYI- that’s a very different list than the same prompt on ChatGPT, which again points to the concept of using a variety of sources and resources in your college search, application, and selection process.  
• Colleges are unlikely to have uniform policies on the use of AI that cuts across their entire student body. They’ll largely leave guidance and appropriate use to individual professors and courses.  
• Most admission offices have not published guidance for applicants or provided public information on how AI should or should not be incorporated as you work on applications, or supplemental questions, etc.  
• Most high school students are using AI to some extent for personal or academic purposes.  
• Colleges want applications that are full of details, specifics, and insight into who you are, how you think, what you have learned, and what you care about.  

So, in hopes of bridging the void and advancing the conversation, as well as giving students, counselors, parents, and school communities (on the K-12 and higher ed side) something to react and respond to (one of AIs biggest value adds), we consulted with experts on campus- specifically Dr. David Joyner in our College of Computing- in order to develop this framework- Georgia Tech’s applicant AI guidance.  

Tools like ChatGPT, Bard and other AI-based assistance programs are powerful and valuable tools. We believe there is a place for them in helping you generate ideas, but your ultimate submission should be your own. As with all other sources, you should not copy and paste content you did not create directly into your application. Instead, if you choose to utilize AI-based assistance while working on your writing submissions for Georgia Tech, we encourage you to take the same approach you would when collaborating with people. Use it to brainstorm, edit, and refine your ideas. AI can also be a useful tool as you consider how to construct your resume in the Activities portion of the Common Application. We think AI could be a helpful collaborator, particularly when you do not have access to other assistance to help you complete your application.  

  The Activities Section. (Hat tip to my colleague Mary Tipton Woolley for her experimentation with this portion.)   

At Georgia Tech, we call this Contribution to Community . We are looking for students to demonstrated “The Three I’s”- Involvement, Impact, and Influence. We talk about this in info sessions, write about it on this blog, and even include guidance and insight, including videos on our website. Still, sometimes students struggle to think through what they’ve done and how to describe that in the boxes provided on college applications.  

Here was my prompt:  can you help me put my work at Subway into the extracurricular activities into the common application  

ChatGPT response:

Absolutely! Including your work experience at Subway in the extracurricular activities section of the Common Application is a great way to showcase your skills, responsibilities, and dedication. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it:  

• Title and Description : Start by giving your extracurricular activity a title. For example, you can write “Subway Employment” or “Subway Crew Member.” Be clear and concise. Then, write a brief description of your role and responsibilities at Subway. Highlight your key achievements and contributions.  
• Organization Name : Mention “Subway” as the organization name.  
• Position/Role : You can list your position or role, such as “Crew Member” or any other relevant title.  
• Time Commitment : Specify the duration of your employment at Subway. Mention the start date and, if applicable, the end date. If you are still working there, you can write “Ongoing” or “Present.”  
• Hours per Week : Mention the average number of hours you worked per week at Subway. This gives colleges an idea of your time management skills.  
• Key Responsibilities : List some of your main responsibilities and tasks at Subway. Highlight skills and qualities you developed while working there. For example:  
• Provided excellent customer service and ensured customer satisfaction.  
• Prepared and served food items according to Subway’s standards.  
• Operated the cash register and handled financial transactions.  
• Maintained cleanliness and sanitation of the store.  
• Collaborated with the team to achieve daily sales targets.  
• Achievements : If you received any awards or recognition during your time at Subway, be sure to mention them. For example, if you were recognized as the “Employee of the Month” or received positive feedback from customers or managers.  
• Personal Growth : Reflect on how your experience at Subway contributed to your personal growth. Did you develop communication skills, learn to work in a fast-paced environment, or improve your problem-solving abilities? Colleges value personal growth and development.  
• Skills Gained : Highlight the skills you gained or improved through this experience. These could include customer service, teamwork, time management, responsibility, or any other relevant skills.  

And then it closed with: Remember to be honest and authentic while describing your experience at Subway. Admissions officers appreciate genuine experiences that showcase your growth and development. Including work experiences like this can demonstrate responsibility, time management, and the ability to balance academics with employment. Good luck with your application!  

  Well…thank you ChatGPT. I appreciate the integrity and encouragement!     

Perfect? Absolutely not. You are not going to have space, nor do you need to delve into “Personal Growth” or “Impact and Learning.” But the rest is helpful, accurate, and fairly thorough.  

You’ll also find these tools helpful if you are struggling to fit an activity into the boxes and character count on an application. Rephrasing, reformatting, iterating, and doing so within specific word parameters is a strength of ChatGPT.  

College Specific Supplements and Essays  

Here is our specific advice:  

In the same way you would not copy directly from any other source you may incorporate into the writing process, you should not copy and paste directly out of any AI platform or submit work that you did not originally create. Instead, approach and consider any interaction with an AI tool as a learning experience that may help you generate ideas, provide alternative phrasing options, and organize your thoughts. Ultimately, we want to read and hear your unique and valuable writing style.  

The truth is that getting started with anything is hard. Getting out the door to go to the gym or for a run, cleaning the house, or working on a project. Momentum is tough to create, and we all need help at times.  

Over the years, I have consistently heard students talk about the dreaded blinking cursor. The tyranny of the blank page. How do I get my thoughts out? How do I figure out what I want to write about or how to phrase things?

Some students have built in resources to help- parents, siblings, teachers, counselors, or other supporting adults around them who they can talk through their activities or essays with. Other students pay for that service and assistance.  

AI tools can complement those other resources and fill a void for students who may not have historically had these benefits. This is a good thing.  

What I AM saying  

ChatGPT can write an essay or supplemental response for you.    

Will it have any personal style, unique details, valuable specifics, or soul? No.  

Is copying, pasting, and submitting something you did not write ever a good idea? No.  

Could reading those before you go to sleep be a helpful substitute for melatonin? Yes.  

AND I am also saying that after reading the essay or supplemental prompts, it could be worth asking ChatGPT to generate a response that will help stimulate ideas and ways to improve and personalize your writing. Again, this is a tool, a collaboration, and a way to get started.    

What YOU can expect 

• Perfect grammar. These tools are built off ridiculous amounts of information. The grammar will be impeccable.
• Inaccuracies and generic writing. After reading what is produced, it will be very sanitized and relatively boring. It will lack specifics and it will not “sound like me.” Some of the content will simply not be accurate.  
• A need to revise. Re-enter the prompt adding in details and specifics. When, where, who, why?
• Head shaking. Wait… NO. That’s not what I meant. That’s not what happened. That’s not how I want to say it. And simultaneously, YES! That could be a good way to go, or I had not thought about putting it that way.
• MOMENTUM! Ok. Now you are rolling. Now your brain is working and you’re homing in on what YOU want to write about. You’ve seen the boring and impersonal way to write about your topic. Now it is time to open that Word document and take some of the lessons you’ve learned and write your own essay or supplemental response.    

As I said earlier, colleges want applications that are full of details, specifics, and insight into who you are, how you think, what you have learned, and what you care about. That’s a lot to ask. And it is a process of brainstorming, iterating, uncovering, discovering, ultimately submitting an application that tells your story. It’s a process. While AI does not make a good author, it can be a helpful stimulator, sounding board, collaborator, and momentum generator.   

Congratulations on your senior year and getting started with your college applications!     

YOUR College Admissions Playbook

This weekend I watched “ American Underdog ,” which is about former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner . Some football fans may remember he was undrafted coming out of college at the University of Northern Iowa. In his first shot with a pro team (the Green Bay Packers), he bombed. He was not ready or prepared. Over the course of the next few years, he played Arena League Football in Des Moines, Iowa. It was in those seasons that he studied, learned, grew, and realized what he wanted and why .

You don’t have a few years before you apply to college—you have a few months. But that is enough because this is not about memorizing and executing a complicated NFL playbook. Instead, I’m boiling your summer college admission application playbook down to five steps.

GET STARTED. I am challenging you to create a Common Application or Coalition Application via Scoir by July 15. The odds are you are going to use one of these platforms to apply to at least one college, and sometimes just getting started is the toughest thing. Whether it be running or writing a paper or doing a chore, the first step is often the one that requires the most energy. But as you know, once the school year starts, you are going to have assignments, practice, work, and tons of other opportunities and obligations as a senior. Knock out the basic biographical information these applications will require now.

CREATE (or UPDATE). If you do not already have one, there are plenty of online templates and resume generators to help you. Again, the summer prior to senior year is the time to do this. Some colleges allow you to upload resumes directly into their application, and with AI tools you can take copy from your resume and easily reformat into the Activities section of college applications.

If you go for a campus visit this summer where an interview is offered, you will want to bring your resume, and ultimately if you are part of scholarship or honors program interviews, you’ll need a refined resume. In our first-year seminar at Georgia Tech, we help students refine resumes because employers, scholarship programs, and research opportunities all expect these. Get ahead when you have capacity this summer.

DRAFT and REVISIT. The Common Application essay prompts are posted. I know the weather is good and sitting in front of a computer is not the first image that pops up when someone says, “Summer.” But your goal in the fall is to be as far out in front of deadlines as possible.

Ultimately, you want to submit an essay that you believe tells more of your story and complements the other information on your application. That’s not going to be done in one sitting—even though we try to tell ourselves, “I do my best work when I’m under pressure.” I’m suggesting you pick a prompt (or two) and knock out a first draft by August 1. Under that timeline, you’ll have plenty of time to revisit your essay, run it by a teacher, counselor, or another trusted adult, and be completely set by October 1 at the latest.

READ and RESEARCH. Since you do not have actual school homework this summer, here is my assignment for the weeks ahead. READ. Think about the colleges you are currently considering and read more about them. Too many students build their list of schools based on rankings, football conferences, or the opinions of others. Read and consider what you learn about a few of the schools you are excited about. Check out their student newspaper, a recent alumni magazine online, or some of the latest stories featuring professors or students.

Ask yourself if what you are seeing excites you, encourages you, and gets you more motivated to apply… or not. This is a gut check. As you are reading, be honest with yourself about why that particular school is of interest and how it landed on your list of colleges to consider.

EDIT and ITERATE. Your first essay draft will not be your best. You will improve your writing by coming back to it with fresh eyes in multiple sittings. Too many students do not look back over their entire application to consider what they have left out or how they can improve the overall submission. But if you follow steps 1-4, you’ll have time to do this. There will be time for a parent, friend, or another adult look over your entire app and ask you questions about why you either did or did not include particular elements. Iterate.

And your college list can (arguably should) be changing this summer too. We are too quick to believe changing our mind is a weakness. Instead, it means you are thinking critically, doing your research, and staying open to what you want, what you learn, and which colleges match and fit your goals and interests. Editing and iterating is a strength. Don’t believe me? Check out Adam Grant’s instructive book or podcast for more on this lifelong skill of re-examining or “thinking again.”

Two Thumbs Up- Another element I loved about the movie was it was clear that Kurt Warner was having fun playing football. There was pressure but he did not look at it like a job. Instead, it was a privilege and an opportunity. That’s what this is, my friends- a privilege and opportunity. My hope is you’ll have fun visiting, researching, and ultimately applying to college. Sound crazy? Sound impossible? See: Kurt Warner.

Stay Curious

Early on in my time at Georgia Tech, a colleague received an email from a prospective student with a full signature line, including an inspirational quote at the bottom. I’m sure you have seen these before.

Typically, it looks something like this:

George P. Burdell King of Georgia Tech “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

In most cases, you immediately recognize the quote (like the one above) or the person to whom it’s attributed. In my experience, Gandhi, MLK, Mother Teresa, or a dead politician or author are fairly common.

This particular situation had us curious because:

• Most high school students don’t have signature lines.
• Neither the quote nor the person to whom it was attributed were familiar.

So, we discussed, we debated, and we Googled. Finally, after extensive investigative research, we connected the dots. The mystery person who uttered these inspiring words was… the applicant’s dad—the different last name threw us off initially, but once we figured this out… it was on. For a good month, every internal email we sent included a quote from our own parents or close relatives.

“Don’t make me pull this car over.”

“Failing to plan means planning to fail.”

“This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

There were a few absolute gems. But it also led to some really personal conversations about our relationships with parents and some of the wise, interesting, and influential things they shared with us growing up.

Now, I’m not proposing you create a formal signature line for your emails during high school or walk around quoting your dad, but I do think this story is instructive. The truth is I cannot recall any of the other signature line quotes I’ve read over the years, but this one is emblazoned in my memory. Why? Because it was not familiar. And as a result, it led us to ask questions, research, and ultimately have enriching, bonding conversations.

In hopes of getting you started, here are a few accessible and available tools you may not have considered yet in your college search and selection experience.

College Scorecard – This site is hosted by the U.S. Department of Education. It is an increasingly valuable tool for searching for schools by academic program, size, cost, location, and other factors. It does a very good job providing details on price, median career earnings, graduation rates, and retention data, which often are tough to find on individual admission or university homepages. As you are researching where to visit or apply, the Scorecard comparison feature is helpful because it is easy to tailor based on a variety of factors. And it will give you data to consider or metrics to compare that you may not have previously encountered or factored. My hope is you will use this along the way, whether it be prior to visiting, applying, or deciding on a college.

ChatGPT – Based on their historically glacial rate of change and adaptation, I do not expect Common Application to include instructive language about the use of AI this year. So, there is no need to stare helplessly at a blinking cursor on the screen. One of generative AI’s greatest strengths is facilitating brainstorming and iteration.

There are seven prompts to choose from in the cycle ahead, so let’s assume you pick this one: Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Include a few bullet points of your ideas and be sure to name specific people, places, situations, and perhaps a quote or two- and then ask the program to produce a response of 500 words.

Make notes of what is accurate and helpful? What does not resonate with you as specific enough or reflective of your voice and experience?

In the essay, admission reviewers want details and insight that is uniquely yours. If you are applying to a college that receives 35,000 applications and the essay responses are evenly divided, then five thousand other students are responding to the same prompt you choose. As my colleague Dr. David Joyner from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing said , “use your interaction with the AI assistant as a learning experience, then let your assignment reflect your improved understanding.”

Degree Choices.   Rankings get a lot of press and attention in the college admission conversation. However, in most cases, we do not dig into how these lists are formulated. Degree Choices provides a series of rankings lists based on region, academic program, return on investment metrics, etc. Even if you do not agree with the way they approach their rankings, at least it gets you thinking about what you do value. As I’ve said before, a good high school student becomes a good college applicant becomes a good college student. That starts with doing your homework, asking questions, re-thinking, and considering a variety of angles and sources.

The Common Data Set Initiative – For the data wonks among you- or for those who want to see information presented in a uniform manner from colleges. You can easily search for any institution’s CDS online. As an example, here is Georgia Tech’s . Particularly in the test optional world we are all attempting to navigate, the CDS can be helpful in understanding the number or percentage of test takers. CDS also highlights retention rates, financial aid distribution, and residency, ethnicity, and gender breakdowns, as well as size of classes, faculty degree attainment information, and more. Looking at multiple years of information in this format can point to trends or suggest institutional priorities. Again, taken alongside other tools and resources, examining Common Data Sets will inevitably generate questions for you to ask or additional topics to research when you visit campus and speak with students, faculty, or admission officers.

Did you wonder who George P. Burdell was in the example signature line? Did you follow the link to learn more? If so, you are well on your way with this whole curiosity and exploration adventure (If not, I’ve got you covered- here’s the link ).

Rick Clark AVP/Executive Director- Undergraduate Admission “Stay Curious.”

Three (MORE) Messages Parents of High School Students Need to Hear About College Admission

Learn more and listen to Q&A about this blog on the College Admission Brief podcast! Apple | Spotify | Spreaker | Google

…and we’re back. As mentioned in Part I , I decided to write these two blogs specifically for my friends, neighbors, and other adults in my life who now have kids in high school or considering college. As such you are welcome to read and consider, read and ignore, or not read but still forward or share.

•  The admissions essay. First, not all colleges require students to write an essay or respond to short answer questions on their application. Those who do include writing as an opportunity for students to bring voice and personalization to an otherwise heavily box, number, and line- filled application. In reading essays, admission reviewers simply want to get a sense of students’ ability to express themselves or provide insight into their character, background, motivations, and so on. As a result, essays matter. Nobody adds questions or prompts to their application just to make it longer. We read. We share. We glean insight from student writing.

However, just as much as a comma splice or failure to underline the name of a book in an essay is not going to keep a student from being admitted, the essay in general is not going to be the thing that “gets your kid in.” Anyone who tells you otherwise: a) has never worked on a college campus b) has a vested (usually monetary) interest in convincing you otherwise c) that’s it. There is no C—other than their pulse on college admission. Is it wise to have someone look over an essay for feedback? Absolutely. Should students put thought, effort, and care into their writing for colleges? Undoubtedly. But as a parent or a supporting adult please do not edit out your kids’ voice/style, or pressure them to write about something they don’t genuinely value or believe has been impactful to them, because in doing so you rob the application of the very qualities we are hoping to see in their writing. More here. Bottom line: Essays are not the magic bullet/Hail Mary/death nail/Lazarus factor people believe them to be.

As your athlete has success at higher and more competitive levels, it is exciting to imagine them playing in bigger stadiums, in front of more people, or even on TV. My hope is you will focus more on the day to day and week to week of supporting, encouraging, and enjoying watching your athlete play club and high school sports, than speculating about or assuming where it may lead. Keep saving for college. Keep pushing your student to excel in the classroom. Be proud of them for who they are and what they’ve accomplished– and be sure they know it. In other words, don’t convince yourself there is an inverse correlation between the number of trophies or media coverage and the number of dollars you will be spending on college. It may play out that way, but in the overwhelming number of cases, it won’t. Dream killer or friend? You decide. Stay grounded, stay humble, and stay focused on being able to finance a college degree without dependence on a full athletic scholarship.

3. Quality of institution is not correlated with admit rate, ranking, or any other singular number or metric.

Whether it be an effort to simplify, ego, or buying into the false narrative around selectivity and rankings, parents and supporting adults too often reduce a student’s options, limit their perspective, and curb their ability to explore based on numbers.

Admit rate: When I arrived at Tech, we were admitting well over 60% of applicants. Just a few years ago we sat around 40%. This year’s class will see an admit rate below 20%. Are the students significantly smarter, more talented, or more destined for future success? Absolutely not. Students we admitted at 60% are running companies now and sitting on boards of major organizations. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of how different colleges count differently on apps received or admits issued, but the bottom line is selectivity level is not a proxy for academic quality. Most colleges in the country admit more students than they deny. If the best match for your student has an admit rate that is 20 points higher than another one they are admitted to, don’t let your ego or a false narrative cloud your judgment.

Ranking : The students at Tech who are currently sophomores applied here when we were ranked number five in the nation for public universities. Within a month of enrolling here, we’d dropped to number eight, and this year we are number 10. I’ve yet to see a student transfer because of this change—because nothing has changed. Same great students, important research, and valuable network/job opportunities. I  urge you to not draw firm (arguably arbitrary) lines, whether it be at number 10, 50, or 100. College is a big decision. College is expensive. College cannot be reduced to one number. Don’t fall into that trap. And for the love of all things holy, friends, if you are going to ascribe any value to a singular number or deem it an authoritative signpost, examine the methodology and ask yourself if your values are in line with their calculations.

In most cases, leading or pushing your student to limit or dictate their choice of where to apply or attend based on one number (or even small set of numbers) is short-sighted bordering on irresponsible .

Since there won’t be a part three to this series, let’s conclude this way. I know it’s challenging supporting your student through high school, and particularly through the college experience. So, while I do hope you will legitimately consider everything I have shared in this blog and the one prior, I also want to sincerely thank you.

Thank you for loving your kids.

Thank you for advocating for them.

Thank you for wanting them to have a better life and more opportunities and experiences than you have had.

Thank you for encouraging them and supporting them, even when they drive you nuts, roll their eyes, mumble one-syllable responses, or keep you up late at night worrying.

Thank you for washing the same dishes and clothes a thousand times.

Thank you for driving to and from practice and sitting through hours of swim meets or dance or music performances (just to hear or see your child perform for a fraction of that time).

Do I wish you wouldn’t disguise your voice in order to procure your daughter’s admission portal password? Sure.

Would admission officers prefer to come in the morning after releasing admission decisions, get a cup of coffee, and check the scores from the night before, rather than having parents outside (or in the parking lot) wanting to appeal or provide 13 additional recommendation letters? Yep.

Do I enjoy having my competence, intelligence, or soul brought into question based on an admission decision? Not particularly.

Nevertheless, as the parent of two kids, I get it. The truth is you are doing what you always have–loving them, protecting them, and providing for them. And since you absolutely do not hear this enough– THANK YOU!

Got friends who won’t read 1200 words on this topic, but still may benefit from hearing these messages– pass them this Twitter thread.

Demystifying admissions, test prep, and education.

Should I Use AI to Write College Application Essays?

In 2022, the world of academics was rocked when ChatGPT3 was released to the public. Unlike its predecessors, which produced work equivalent to that of a 5th grader, ChatGPT3 produces high-quality text passages and takes specific, complex directions. With a little prompting, it can write anything you want it to – a schedule, a quiz, a summary, or even an essay. And it only takes seconds.

All of a sudden, the world of academics found itself grappling with a question it wasn’t prepared to handle – what is generative AI’s place in the world of education? The consensus is largely that it does have a place, but after that – the conclusions are all over the place. Like Pandora’s box, genAI has been released into the world for free use, and it is unlikely to be reigned in any time soon. We are at a point where technology is progressing faster than regulators – who often aren’t even aware of the technology’s capabilities, let alone able to grasp its potential impacts – can respond.

Professors have had to turn on a dime to try to control its use in the classroom, and for the most part universities (such as Drexel , UMiami , and Purdue ) have refused to implement broad bans, or even limits, to its use, leaving professors to come up with their own rules – and to decide the consequences for breaking them.

But that’s all after a student has been admitted. What happens if a student uses AI to help them write the essays they submit for their applications ? Some universities have published guidelines, such as Georgia Tech , who encourages students to use genAI to “brainstorm, edit, and refine your ideas.” Others, such as Dartmouth College, have only given vague statements , such as the one by dean of admissions Lee Coffin: “The idea that this central component of a story could be manufactured by someone other than the applicant is disheartening.”

But, there are more AI programs than ChatGPT or even Bard. You may be using AI without even realizing it.

So, what’s a student to do? Take a look below for our tips on how to navigate the minefield that is AI in college admissions.

Somehow, Grammarly seems to have flown under the radar when it comes to AI discourse, with ChatGPT taking center stage. It was originally released as an application meant to assist professionals with writing formal emails, documents, and essays. It checks grammar and makes suggestions on how to change familiar, wordy, or colloquial phrases into more formal, concise, or stronger language (e.g. “I think we should be able to” is corrected to the simpler, “We can”). However, as with all AI, it needs to be checked for accuracy. It also has sentence-completion features, or the ability to “re-write” a passage while following instructions (e.g. “Add a pun”).

Should you use it?

Features such as checking for grammar are fair game; anyone who has battled the little red squiggle in a Word document knows this tool has been around for decades. The other aspect of Grammarly that makes it slightly less questionable is that it explains its suggestions and tells you why you should follow them.

We suggest turning off any generative features, such as sentence completion, and to refrain from having it “rewrite.”

Google Docs

If you open a Google Doc and begin to type, you will eventually see greyed out phrases after your blinking curser. You didn’t turn it on, so it’s just a feature of a word processing app, right? Wrong. It’s generative AI. It’s called SmartCompose, and if you see it in the comments and replies sections, it’s called SmartReply. Google states, “Smart Compose and Smart Reply don’t provide answers and may not always provide factually correct information.”

The problem with SmartCompose is that it gives you suggestions before you ask for them, and so it can speed up your writing process, but it can also suggest meaning. If you are stuck on a line, and unsure of where to go, SmartCompose will lead you there – but that means the ideas can be swayed further and further from your voice, and if you take too many suggestions, you can quickly get to a point of having a paragraph of nonsense.

For best results, we don’t think so. That doesn’t mean you have to stop using Google Docs, though. To turn it off, open your document, click Tools > Preferences and de-select “Show SmartCompose suggestions.”

ChatGPT is the most spotlighted and controversial of the generative AI programs. It’s the one everyone is talking about, and the guidelines are all over the place. While some schools are okay with its use in certain circumstances, others have blanket bans. In the case of college admissions, we like to keep it simple: just stay away. Using it to brainstorm might be okay for Georgia Tech, but it might get your essay tossed by Dartmouth if they run it through an AI detector. You might think you’re saving yourself time and effort, but it could backfire much too easily.

And, being entirely honest, the type of writing it is producing is not worth submitting anyway. It’s great for technical writing and how-tos, but a personal statement is supposed to be just that: personal. ChatGPT can’t write about personal anecdotes, memories, or the way things changed your perspective. It comes across as soulless and robotic, and sometimes, the writing is so meandering it doesn’t make a point at all.

Long story short, AI is still in its infancy. We predict that its use will be explored in many facets of the admissions process – by both students and admissions teams alike – but when it comes to writing a heartfelt, personal, and truthful essay, AI is no replacement for your own hard work.

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Educators see a role for ai in college admissions essays, many educators and college faculty are ok with students consulting chatgpt for help on admissions essays, but chatbots can't be a replacement for a student's own voice, subjective experience and thoughts..

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Ethical concerns, 'paralysis of the blinking cursor'.

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Willie Jones covers transportation for IEEE Spectrum and the history of technology for The Institute.

A new school year is dawning for the Northern Hemisphere, which means a new crop of high school seniors are staring down the dreaded college admissions process. To secure their place at the institution of higher learning of their choice, many of these students will need to write personal essays that reveal their perspective on the world and on themselves while showing how proficient they are at composing a cohesive, elegant narrative.

If the U.S. college admissions scandal of a few years ago revealed one thing, it’s that it’s difficult to fake being an A student or the starting left tackle on the football team and maintain that ruse for long. But the essay-writing portion of the competition for spots in colleges’ freshman classes is increasingly being infiltrated by AI, says Christopher Hathaway. He’s both a former member of the admissions committee at Yale University and now runs Advantage Ivy Tutoring , a service that coaches high school students to help them make the most of their academic abilities and extracurricular interests. In doing so, says Hathaway, “you inherently end up with good candidates” for schools like Yale that have ultralow acceptance rates. Hathaway operates near the front line of a growing controversy as schools attempt to adjust, articulate, and/or enforce their respective stances on how the use of AI for crafting college admission essays dovetail with their existing honor codes that spell out penalties for, say, cheating on exams and plagiarism.

At first blush, you might assume that applicants to the most competitive schools—think Yale, Harvard , and Princeton , which admit less than 5 percent of candidates—would have the most incentive to take advantage of AI for even the slightest edge. But, as it turns out, the opposite is true. The level of writing skill these schools’ admissions committees want to see is advanced enough that generative AI as it exists today is incapable of producing text with the requisite level of sophistication. The upshot, says Hathaway, is that “AI use for essay writing becomes more prevalent as you get to schools that are less selective—you know, those that are accepting maybe 50 percent of their applicants. The quality of writing obviously is a lower standard. It’s in that milieu that we have seen AI become a presence.”

“We asked one of the chatbots to use an extended metaphor in an essay, and eight of 16 times, it used some kind of an orchestra metaphor.” —Christopher Hathaway, Advantage Ivy Tutoring

The first challenge for these schools’ admissions officers is answering a basic question: What are some telltale signs of an AI-generated essay? “My team and I recently finished a pretty extensive study with the four mainstream chatbots— Chat GPT , Bard , Bing , and GPT-4 ,” says Hathaway. “We’re talking 65-plus hours of trials. And what we came up with, in terms of the signature signs of AI, is first, a lack of creativity. In one of the examples, a sample student was interested in art and had gotten really interested in it because of his interest in comic books featuring underwater creatures. In the first draft, the chatbots just said that, effectively. In the next draft, we asked the bots to provide additional detail. Two of these chatbots provided descriptions of the underwater creatures. And the interesting thing was that they came up with the exact same animals in the exact same order.” Chatbots’ “if-one-is-good, more-of-the-same-is-better” approach is an issue that students are going to run into in their real-world attempt to get a one-size-fits-all artificial intelligence to help them deliver a narrative that’s supposed to be deeply personal.

“These bots are just systematically looking for the next best word that fits into a sequence statistically,” says Hathaway. “Add to that the fact that they’re effectively pulling from the same material repeatedly, and so that really impacts authenticity and originality.”

Another issue commonly encountered with AI-generated essays is stilted language that’s corporate in tone and syntactically uninteresting. “We asked one of the bots to use an extended metaphor in an essay, and eight of 16 times, it used some kind of an orchestra metaphor,” Hathaway recalls. “And this was GPT-4 , which was, by far, the most competent of the bots.” Imagine being an admissions officer at a large state school who must review 4,000 of, say, 20,000 applications that came in before the deadline. If half of the essays present the same metaphor, reading them back-to-back would become stultifying, and hardly any of the candidates would stand out.

Just as problematic, Hathaway notes, is that when the bots were asked to switch things up, they defaulted to exaggerated, often sensationalist verbiage. “They definitely went overboard,” says, Hathaway, remembering that the chatbots found no middle ground between short, declarative sentences that did a lot of telling, not showing, and incredibly flowery language that became recognizable as one of the bots’ hackneyed hallmarks.

Still, a big challenge for admissions officers—besides boredom—is being certain about whether any particular essay has been cowritten or completely ghostwritten by AI. One bugaboo for universities has been false positives. The use of software-based detectors as a countermeasure has left U.S. schools open to accusations of bias against non-native English speakers. “Non-native speakers who are submitting applications are having a little bit more difficulty with their admissions essays being flagged,” says Hathaway.

“You’ve got places that are already restructuring their curricula in response. George Washington University and Rutgers University are phasing out take-home, open-book assignments because they just assume that people are going to cut these corners.” –Christopher Hathaway, Advantage Ivy Tutoring

But not every school is interested in turning out the next generation of great (or even above average) writers. The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta is an, er, textbook example of a school whose academic departments place a much lower premium on writing skill and proudly hold more of a protechnology bias than do those at the aforementioned liberal arts colleges. It’s therefore no shock that Georgia Tech has given its applicants the green light to use AI to respond to the essay prompt on the school’s application.

Asked whether schools taking this pro-AI stance should be concerned about students feeling they have license to use the technology to complete assignments given by their professors during the academic year, Hathaway says, “Professors are going to need to adjust the way they’re presenting and assigning work. You’ve got places that are already restructuring their curricula in response. George Washington University and Rutgers University are phasing out take-home, open-book assignments because they just assume that people are going to cut these corners. And so, [Georgia Tech and other schools] are going to need to figure out different ways of assessing students’ skills—whether that’s via in-class assignments and handwritten papers and such, or oral exams.” And since AI doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, these adjustments and many others might soon be endemic to academia across the board.

It’s clear that that Georgia Tech has given thoughtful consideration to these issues—and concerns that AI use will widen rather than bridge the digital divide. The primary bit of evidence supporting that is the fact that the technical school’s liberal arts college is offering a new course this fall called “AI Ethics and Policy.” According to the course description, the class will “prepare students to think critically about AI’s impact on humanity and contribute to AI governance and policy.” Still, it’s hard to see how school officials reached the conclusion that an applicant leaning on a chatbot for essay help doesn’t defeat the essay’s stated purpose, which the school says is “to assess your writing ability, and, more importantly, to learn more about you as an individual.”

• Hallucinations Could Blunt ChatGPT’s Success ›
• How ChatGPT Could Revolutionize Academia ›
• ChatGPT can generate an essay. But could it generate an “A”? ›
• Need an AI essay writer? Here's how ChatGPT (and other chatbots ... ›

Willie Jones is an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum . In addition to editing and planning daily coverage, he manages several of Spectrum 's newsletters and contributes regularly to the monthly Big Picture section that appears in the print edition.

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How to boost your college applications using ai — without cheating the essay.

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LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 03: In this photo illustration, the OpenAI "ChatGPT" AI-generated answer ... [+] to the question "What can AI offer to humanity?" is seen on a laptop screen on February 03, 2023 in London, England. OpenAI, whose online chatbot ChatGPT made waves when it was debuted in December, announced this week that a commercial version of the service, called ChatGPT Plus, would soon be available to users in the United States. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The use of ChatGPT and other AI tools has added to the noise that surrounds the college application process every year. Analysts question whether the college essay will survive , if students will cheat , and how ChatGPT will impact educational equity . For the first two concerns, solutions discussed in the college admissions world include the use of proctored and handwritten essays, or sending in portfolio materials in lieu of essays. As I covered in a recent piece on Forbes , Common App delayed the release of its prompts, possibly due to ChatGPT concerns.

While ChatGPT has many questioning the role and usefulness of the college essay, there are ways to make the college admissions process more efficient and effective in the exploration and application phases.

Prepare For Campus Tours

When students go for campus tours, they are often unsure about which questions to ask. Before embarking on a long journey for a college visit, use artificial intelligence to help you to generate some questions. Here’s an example of how you would ask ChatGPT could help you prepare you for your tour:

Act as a prospective student visiting Vanderbilt University who's interested in engineering, debate team, and Asian-American life on campus. What are some questions to ask on a college tour when interacting with my tour guide?

The“Act as” feature in ChatGPT allows you to get a more personalized answer for your own needs and preferences while inserting personal details about your life and targeted characteristics.

However, ChatGPT did not generate my personal favorite human tour question: Can you tell me about 1-2 initiatives or academic programs that people on campus are talking a lot about these days? This question is gold because it helps students to get some clues about aspects of campus life to emphasize in college essays based on current trends.

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Best covid-19 travel insurance plans, create a college application timeline.

Many students and families struggle with managing all of the college application tasks associated with the college application process. AI can support you to stay organized and create deadlines for yourself. Here’s an example query where ChatGPT can help your calendar:

I am a prospective undergraduate student who needs help organizing my timeline and deadlines. Develop a comprehensive timeline for April 2023-December 2023 that includes essay writing, including my supplement essays, creating my resume and activity list, filling out application forms, filling in the FAFSA. I am applying to early decision and early action colleges that have deadlines in November as well as regular decision colleges which have deadlines in January. Give an answer in tabular format.

Here is ChatGPT’s (partial) response:

College admissions timeline by ChatGPT

The output of “tabular format” is super helpful for keeping dates and tasks organized and holding yourself accountable to complete application goals.

Research The Most Important Financial Aid Metric: Net Price Of Colleges

Net price is the important figure in evaluating college costs, not tuition and fees . It is equal to out-of-pocket expenses minus, grants, loans and education tax benefits. That is the term to use when you query ChatGPT, you want to ask about the net price for the colleges you’re interested in, rather than tuition and fees. You also want to get the links to each college’s net price calculator so that you can calculate your expected out-of-pocket expenses:

I am a prospective undergraduate student who's looking to know the net price I can expect to pay at certain institutions. Can you show me the average net price of these 5 institutions along with the weblinks to these institutions' net price calculators? New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Notre Dame, Rice University. Give an answer in tabular format.

Here's ChatGPT’s (partial) response:

Net Price List from ChatGPT

Now that you know about the net price query, you can begin to research the financial aspects of colleges in a more efficient way as well as easily find calculators for each school.

Create Your Personalized College List

As students and parents, you have many criteria for what you’re looking for in a college; including location, size, list of interested majors, and net price. Here’s what it might look like to query ChatGPT, according to your criteria:

I am seeking a list of colleges, including their websites, within 6-8 hours driving distance from Philadelphia, PA, with an average net price between $10,000-$20,000. These colleges should have an active fraternity scene, engineering programs and a flexible curriculum. Give the answer in tabular format.

While AI is not a substitute for college fairs , virtual college information sessions, and campus tours, it is a great tool for putting together an initial college list based upon your criteria and discovering new schools you may not have considered. After getting the initial list from ChatGPT, you can double-check the fit of these colleges by digging into their specific programs, resources and admissions information.

Discover Relevant Scholarships

While there are many websites to find scholarships, AI can create a list of opportunities for you based on your academic performance, identity groups, affiliations, and any other personal qualities. Note that the data on ChatGPT is only included until 2021, so you must include this year in your query to generate the most up-to-date response:

I am a prospective undergraduate student who's looking for scholarships. Some details about me are that I'm a neurodivergent woman with 1550 on my SAT and a 4.0 GPA. I am excellent at Lacrosse and debate and have received awards for both pursuits. Show me a list of available scholarships that I can apply for from 2021 including the award amounts and websites where I can learn more. Give an answer in tabular format.

Once you have the list of scholarships, you can then revert back to the timeline query I shared above and start organizing your scholarship deadlines.

One final point: If you like what you see on your ChatGPT lists, you can always follow up your query with another: “Can you add more to this list?” While using one AI tool alone cannot substitute in-depth research and human-to-human connection in your college search and discovery process, it gives you a way to kickstart and supercharge your college application process in a way that’s never before been possible.

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Applying to College? Here’s How A.I. Tools Might Hurt, or Help.

ChatGPT might change the application essay forever.

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By Natasha Singer

I spent the last week talking with university officials, teachers and high school seniors about the dreaded college admissions essay.

I cover education technology at The Times. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, which can manufacture school essays and other texts, might reshape the college application process.

I was particularly interested to learn whether admissions officials were rejiggering their essay questions — or even reconsidering personal essays altogether.

Amid a deluge of high school transcripts and teacher recommendations, admissions officers often use students’ writing samples to identify applicants with unique voices, experiences, ideas and potential. How might that change now that many students are using A.I. chatbots to brainstorm topics, generate rough drafts and hone their essays?

To find out, I contacted admissions officials at more than a dozen large state universities, Ivy League schools and small private colleges, including Juan Espinoza , the director of undergraduate admissions at Virginia Tech.

Right now, he told me, many universities are still trying to figure out how the A.I. technologies work and what they mean for the admissions process.

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How Georgia State University Used an Algorithm to Help Students Navigate the Road to College

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• Hunter Gehlbach

AI can personalize communications at scale.

AI technology has come a long way — but what will it take for these automated tools to effectively replace human decision-making? In this piece, the authors discuss a research study conducted at Georgia State University in which an AI tool helped high school students with their transition to college, matching student data with text-based outreach to help students complete matriculation tasks. For example, students who did not complete the FAFSA would receive outreach, including step-by-step guidance through the process. The system leveraged artificial intelligence to handle an ever-growing set of student issues, challenges, and questions (e.g., When is orientation? Can I have a car on campus? Where do I find a work-study job?), efficiently scaling to reach large numbers of students, and getting smarter over time. This study illustrates how combining data integration with artificial intelligence can benefit any institution that relies heavily on communication with multiple important stakeholders.

As AI continues to develop, a major test of its potential will be whether it can replace human judgment in individualized, complex ways. At Georgia State University, we investigated a test case where AI assisted high school students in their transition to college , helping them to navigate the many twists and turns along the way.

• LP Lindsay Page is an assistant professor of research methodology and a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on quantitative methods and their application to questions regarding the effectiveness of educational policies and programs across the pre-school to postsecondary spectrum. linzcpage
• HG Hunter Gehlbach is an associate professor of education and the Director of Research at Panorama Education, a Boston-based start-up that facilitates K-12 school improvement through data collection and analysis. His work focuses on the social aspects of schooling, designing better surveys and questionnaires, and environmental education.  He tweets @HunterGehlbach .

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