While many high school seniors spend months preparing their college applications, writing essays and revising them over and over, an automated computer program can write a college essay for you in less than two minutes! Simply type in the prompt, a few pieces of information about yourself, click send, and shortly after you will have a literary masterpiece to present to your dream university. With the rise of AI technology in the past few years, there has not been enough time to fully see how college applications are being affected, and if admissions officers are actually taking the use of artificial intelligence seriously. Some people predict that schools, previously “test blind”, will begin looking less towards the writing for admission decisions, and returning to more emphasis on test scores. On the other hand, Duke University suggests that the rising use of AI is unavoidable, therefore shouldn’t be much of a concern. Admissions officer Christoph Guttentag points out that the admissions officers should be more concerned with “learning about the student from the essay” and what the student would bring to the college community, rather than focusing on how well-written the sentences are or “who may have influenced the style of the essay.”
Luckily, most colleges have a system to check for both plagiarized work and to detect AI in your writing, which hopefully scares off many students from submitting a fully AI written essay. However, this doesn’t mean that AI cannot be used at all for college applications. In fact, it can be used in many ways as an extremely helpful tool. The Statement of Integrity form by the University of California (UC) college application reads, “Students may receive advice on content and editing, including the use of generative artificial intelligence software to assist with readability, but content and final written text must be their own.” So clearly, colleges do give a little wiggle room for the use of AI.
After doing some research and going through the college application process myself, I’ve found some ways that AI can be used in a helpful way without destroying the authenticity of your application. One website, Esai.ai, can be useful to help brainstorm ideas as well as recommending colleges and majors to you based on your personality. These tools can be extremely helpful to get you jump started on your application journey, if you haven’t started yet. The Esai.ai company also makes it clear that their mission is to educate users on ethical use of AI by offering an “AI certification” course and displaying three major guidelines for their users to follow when navigating the intelligent software. Additionally, with word count limitations on certain essays, including the UC’s notorious personal inventory questions, AI can be helpful in suggesting what words and or information can be cut out in order to fit the correct size. Finally, there are many helpful online proofreading tools such as Grammarly to help with grammatical and spelling errors if you have nobody to proofread your work.
As AI becomes more mainstream, both the student and the universities will have to continue evaluating AI’s place in the college application process. Truly, it is not hard to imagine a day when AI may be the ‘person’ reading your essay and deciding if you get into your dream school!