I spent the last week talking to 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 generate school essays and other texts, could change the college application process.
I’m particularly interested to know if admissions officers have revised their essay questions – or even reconsidered personal essays altogether.
Amid the flood 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 AI chatbots to brainstorm topics, develop rough drafts and hone their essays?
To find out, I contacted admissions officers at more than a dozen large state universities, Ivy League schools and small private colleges, including Juan Espinozathe director of undergraduate admissions at Virginia Tech.
Right now, he told me, many universities are still trying to figure out how AI technologies work and what they mean for the admissions process.
“But let’s be clear: Students use it to answer these essay questions,” he added. “So we have to think about how they use it.”
You can read more in my article today about the implications of AI tools for college applications.
AI skeptics
I also got some interesting insights into what admissions offices think about ChatGPT by listening to podcasts from different universities. “Inside the Yale Admissions Office,” a podcast from Yale University, dedicated an episode on AI tools this week.
The title of the episode — “AI and College Essays: Wrong Question, Wrong Answer” — is candid about Yale’s vision.
During the podcast, two Yale admissions officers discussed how using tools like ChatGPT to write college essays is a form of plagiarism. An applicant who submitted an essay generated by the chatbot, they said, would be in violation of the university’s admissions policy.
Yale experts also argued that personal essays for college applications are “meant to be introspective and reflective.” And they say outsourcing that kind of personal thinking to an AI chatbot won’t help.
“AI-generated content doesn’t do very well in the form of communication that works in college essays,” Hannah Mendlowitz, senior associate director of admissions at Yale, said in the podcast.
But after doing some basic AI experiments, I feel that such views may not last long.
This week, I used ChatGPT and other tools to create responses to some of the short-answer questions from Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth. Although the AI bots got some facts wrong, after a few rounds of prompting and prompting they were able to produce answerable writing. It’s easy to see how high school students could use these tools to develop first drafts and then rewrite texts to reflect their own voices and experiences.
Ethical or not, the tools can help students who feel stuck, or aren’t naturally drawn to essay writing, get started.
You can read short answer college essays generated by chatbots in my article here.
A democratizing force
Virginia Tech’s Espinoza and other admissions experts told me they think ChatGPT can be a democratizing force, especially for high school students whose parents have limited or no experience. in applying to colleges.
“I wonder what role it can play in simplifying this complicated process,” Espinoza said, adding that he is a first-generation collegegoer himself. “If there’s a way this tool can help those with different starting points catch up, or narrow those differences, I think that shows a lot of promise.”
To get some suggestions on how high school students applying to college can use AI tools, I interviewed Meg Scheid, the college outreach coordinator at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, a top public high school in the Atlanta area.
As ChatGPT gained traction in schools last winter, he worries that students across the country could be using it to pass off AI-generated writing as their own work. He quickly changed his mind after he realized that high school students could use AI tools to conduct college searches to fit narrow criteria — such as large public universities in the South known for their biostatistics research, or small private colleges that offer full scholarships to soccer players.
Scheid said AI chatbots could also be helpful for students trying to condense long lists of extracurricular activities into limited space on college applications.
“It allows students to make sure they’re letting colleges know: ‘I’m not just the captain of the basketball team. I also did these other things that really point to me as a person,’” she said.
AI brainstorming
Khan Academy, the online education nonprofit, recently developed its own AI chatbot for schools, called Khanmigo. And now it includes a feature designed to help students come up with ideas for college admissions essays. I tried it this week.
Khanmigo can be a talkative and energetic collaborator. She begins a session by advising students that college essays are not the “place to share a list of your accomplishments — rather, it’s an opportunity to showcase your unique personality and perspective .”
It then offers students a list of common pitfalls to avoid when writing their essays. One is: “Don’t write about how other people’s suffering makes you realize how lucky you are, or how good your life is. This type of essay makes college admissions officers cringe.”
I think the brainstorming feature can be useful, especially for students who have difficulty deciding on an essay topic. Khanmigo starts by asking users overview questions about their experiences. Then it’s on to the themes that look promising.
I tried a real example from my teenage years: One summer I worked at a bagel store in the morning and interned in a genetics lab in the afternoon.
Khanmigo zeroed in on that summer experience. It asks some follow-up questions to get details that might be useful for a college essay:
KHANMIGO: Wow, waking up at 5 am to work at a bagel store so you can intern in a genetics lab in the afternoon — that’s dedication! 🙌 How has this experience changed you as a person? What did you learn here?
The software continued to ask for visual details about the bagel shop and the lab. These types of descriptions can obviously help enrich an opening scene in a college essay.
I’m not arguing that AI tools are a perfect replacement for teachers, counselors, parents, friends and other people who can help with college essays. But I appreciated the instant feedback from Khanmigo and the other AI chatbots I tested this week. It definitely made essay writing more fun!
For next week, I’ll look at how educators are using AI tools to help build letters of recommendation for their students. If you are a college professor or high school teacher who wants to share your experiences with AI chatbots, please fill out this form. We may use your response in a future newsletter.
