Rick Clark, the executive director of undergraduate admissions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his staff spent several weeks this summer posing as high school students using AI chatbots to fill out college applications.
Admissions officers take on different personas in high school: swim team captain, Eagle Scout, musical theater performer. They then provided personal details about fictional students to ChatGPT, prompting the AI chatbot to generate the kind of extracurricular activity lists and personal essays typically required of college application.
said Mr. Clark said he wanted to learn how AI chatbots could revolutionize the admissions process this fall — the start of the first full academic year in which the tools will be widely available to high school seniors — and come up with guidance for -students applying to Georgia Tech.
“Students at some level will have access to and use AI,” Mr. Clark said. “The big question is: How do we want to direct them, knowing that it’s out there and available to them?”
The ready availability of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which can produce human-like text in response to brief prompts, is poised to upend the traditional undergraduate application process at select colleges — ushering in an era of automated plagiarism or democratized student access to essay writing help. Or maybe both.
Digital disruption is coming at an inflection point for higher education institutions across the United States. After the Supreme Court ruled in June that race-based university admissions programs are illegal, some select universities and colleges are hoping to rely more on essay questions — about upbringing, identity and community. applicant — to help foster diversity on campus.
The personal essay has long been a staple of the application process at elite colleges, not to mention a bane for generations of high school students. Admissions officers often use applicants’ essays as a lens into their unique character, pluck, potential and ability to handle adversity. As a result, some former students said they felt intense pressure to develop, or at least invent, a single personal writing voice.
But new AI tools threaten to recast the college application essay as a kind of generic cake mix, to which high school students can simply put oil or spices to show their own tastes, interests and experiences – which calls into question the legitimacy of applicants’ writing samples as true, individualized admissions metrics.
“I’m so sad,” Lee Coffinthe dean of admissions at Dartmouth College, said on a university podcast this year that touches on AI-generated application essays. “The idea that the main part of a story can be done by someone other than the applicant is discouraging.”
Some teachers say they are troubled by the idea of students using AI tools to create college essay themes and texts for deeper reasons: Outsourcing writing to bots can prevent students from developing important critical thinking and storytelling skills.
“Part of the college essay process is finding your writing voice through all that drafting and revision,” says Susan Barber, an Advanced Placement English literature teacher at Midtown High School, a public school in Atlanta. . “And I think that’s something that ChatGPT is robbing them of.”
In August, Ms. Barber has his 12th grade students write college essays. This week, he held class discussions about ChatGPT, warning students that using AI chatbots to generate ideas or writing could make their college essays too generic. He advised them to focus more on their personal views and voices.
Other educators say they hope AI tools can have an impact on democracy. Wealthier high school students, these experts say, often have access to resources — parents of alumni, family friends, paid writing coaches — to help them brainstorm, draft and -edit their college entrance essays. ChatGPT can play a similar role for students who lack such resources, they say, especially those at large high schools where overworked college counselors have little time for individual teaching essay.
To date, however, very few US universities have published admissions policies on applicants’ use of AI tools.
The University of Michigan Law School recently issued guidelines which says “applicants must not use ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence tools as part of their drafting process.” But the law school allows applicants to ask mentors, friends or other people “for basic proofreading assistance and general feedback and critiques.”
The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University took the opposite stance. The law school’s website says applicants can use AI tools to prepare their application materials as long as they “use this technology responsibly” and verify that the information they submitted is true.
After experimenting with ChatGPT this summer, the admissions team at Georgia Tech chose a third approach. The university website recently posted guidelines high school applicants are encouraged to use AI tools as collaborators to “brainstorm, refine and edit” their ideas. At the same time, the site warned applicants that they should not “copy and paste content that you did not directly create in your application.”
Mr. Clark, the Georgia Tech admissions officer, said ChatGPT can’t compete with live writing coaches or smart parents in giving high school students feedback on their personal essays. But he hopes it will help many students get started.
“It’s free, it’s accessible and it’s useful,” Mr. Clark said. “It’s progress toward equity.”
Several high school seniors said in interviews that they chose not to use AI tools to help draft their essays — partly because they wanted to tell their own personal stories, and partly because many universities did not get a clear stance on the use of chatbots applicants.
“The vagueness and ambiguity is a little difficult for us,” said Kevin Jacob, a senior at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in the Atlanta area. Public high schools have a dedicated writing center where students can get feedback on their college essays.
Common App, a nonprofit group that operates an online system that allows high school students to apply to multiple colleges and universities at once, has not taken a public stance on the use of AI chatbots . The group requires applicants to certify that their writing — and other material they submit as part of their college applications — is their own work. But the group has not updated the academic integrity policy on its website to include artificial intelligence tools.
“This is the first full application cycle where students have the ability to use ChatGPT, and this technology is constantly evolving,” Jenny Rickard, Common App’s chief executive, said in a statement.
“We are all learning more about these tools, and it is important for our member institutions and our K-12 partners and advisors to set reasonable parameters for how they can and cannot be used.”
The New York Times emailed more than a dozen universities and colleges — including large state schools, Ivy League schools and small private colleges — asking about their policies on high school applicants using the tools of AI to draft their admission essays. Most did not respond or declined to comment.
In a statement sent by email, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at the University of Michigan said the school is “aware of the new technology” but “has not made any changes to our undergraduate application process, including our essay questions.”
Ritika Vakharia, a senior at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, said she tried asking ChatGPT to generate ideas for college admissions essays. But she found the responses too broad and impersonal, even after she gave her details about her extracurricular activities like teaching dance classes to young students.
Now he says he’s working to come up with a more personal college application essay theme.
“I feel a little more pressure to create, like, this very unique, interesting subject,” Ms. Vakharia, “because a major topic these days can only be generated by ChatGPT.”
