Sometimes changes to how colleges handle admissions are announced with fanfare and discussed endlessly; the long saga of test optional admissions, and then some universities returning to requiring test scores is a good example of this. Other times when colleges make a change, it comes more quietly, and students can be surprised by it. As AI has risen in prominence, colleges have rolled out various policies on its usage. These ban or heavily restrict it for the most part, especially when it comes to applications. This means that if a college catches you using an AI to answer one of their essay questions, you will be rejected automatically.
In this article, we’re going to explore how colleges are doing this, and why they care about the use of AI in essays. We’re going to look at whether there are any ways to use AI in your writing process, and finally give a few tips on creating the kinds of essays admissions officers do want to see. Let’s get started!
How Admissions Officers Know if You Use AI
This varies by school. As with every aspect of the admissions process, each school handles things differently. There are, however, two general ways colleges detect these:
- Plagiarism checkers
- Personal insight
The first method is the most straightforward. Many plagiarism detection tools now also include a feature that assesses whether or not a composition is AI generated. These are not foolproof of course; they miss some AI generated content and produce false positives on occasion, but they are still quite good on the whole at detecting the use of AI. This is an arms race between them and the generating companies of course, but essays that are flagged for being primarily written by AI will be marked down.
The other method colleges use is the personal insight of admissions officers. This is quite straightforward; admissions officers read thousands of essays each year, and are extremely familiar with how high school students think and write. They are then able to use this expertise to notice when prose feels off in a way that is unnatural, as if it wasn’t written by a student. AI generated writing itself has a number of tells, especially if you encounter it often. Again, this is not a foolproof method, but essays suspected of using AI will be marked harshly for it.
What impacts exactly this has will depend on college. Some schools will automatically reject applications they believe used AI, others will just have it as a major mark against them. Since essays are such an important part of the admissions process, a major penalty here is often the same as a rejection. Admissions officers will likely not catch every student who uses AI, but those who do are taking a major risk for their chances of acceptance, often without even knowing it.
Why Colleges Care About AI
Colleges clearly care about whether or not applicants are using AI in their application, but why? There are two main concerns admissions officers have. Now, we generally advocate for students to do all the work themselves, but colleges do have some legitimate reasons to want you to do this work yourself, rather than outsourcing it.
The first reason is that colleges are trying to get to know you through your essays. They want to understand how you think about the world, and your place in it. For this, they need to hear from you in your own words, to get inside your thought process and view things from your perspective. The use of AI precludes this; they aren’t hearing your words and thoughts, but a generalized abstraction of them created by another entity, one without your unique insights.
The second reason is that college requires a lot of writing, and has high standards for academic honesty. With the rise of easily available generative AI, most colleges have rolled out policies stating whether or not students are allowed to use it in their coursework, and under what conditions. These vary slightly, but the general consensus is that students are not permitted to use AI to do their coursework for them.
If colleges have this as a standard for their current students, then they’re definitely going to apply the same standards to those students who are trying to join their student body. This makes sense logically, but can still catch high school students off guard, as they are generally unfamiliar with the AI policies of universities.
Thus, if you use AI in your essays, you are hurting your chances twice over from the perspective of colleges. First, they don’t know what insights and thoughts are yours, and which are of the AI. Colleges want to know you and your voice, to see how you will fit with them, and they can’t do that if writing is not your own. Second, if you violate a college’s academic honesty policy on your application, that’s a major red flag. Current students who violate these can face suspension or expulsion, so prospective students who do so are simply not admitted at all.
Can AI be Used in College Applications?
So AI pretty clearly should not be used to write your essays. That said, this is a tool many students are coming to rely on, so is there any place for it in crafting a college application?
In general, the answer is going to be no. AI does have uses, but many of its strengths work against it in the admissions process, while its cons come more clearly to the fore. We’ll go through this point by point, to discuss how AI can be used, and where it probably shouldn’t.
Research
Many people now turn to ChatGPT and other AI tools to do research. Indeed, Google even encourages this with its own in-built AI system. The issue with this is that the answers you get are not always accurate. AI tools can pull from old data, or hallucinate something that sounds plausible, but which doesn’t actually exist.
This can be a problem when researching colleges, as AI may describe to you a program which doesn’t exist alongside one that does, or mention scholarships that have been cancelled, or give you incorrect details. The point of researching colleges is to determine whether or not they are a good fit for you, and to do that, you need an accurate picture of what they offer to students. AI, unfortunately, can’t guarantee being able to do that yet.
Writing
As we discussed above, AI is not a good tool to help with writing either. You may be able to find some use in getting help brainstorming or structuring your essays, but here too there are some drawbacks. In brainstorming, an AI is not able to differentiate a good idea from a bad one; many of them are programmed to be agreeable, so will go with whatever you think. This can be good to play off of, but doesn’t offer legitimate critique for a brainstorming process.
The one place an AI can help is in determining a structure for an essay. It can’t write it for you, but it can help you order your ideas. We do want to urge caution here; many AI tools have been trained on vast swathes of mediocre college essays, and this shows when you ask one to generate an essay for you. These have repetitive ideas, generic examples, and lots of flowery phrases that sound quite good without ever actually meaning anything. Even if admissions officers don’t detect that these are AI, they just aren’t very good as essays.
For editing, we advise not using AI. Many students are surprised to learn this, but getting editing help from one of these programs often counts as academic dishonesty, and will frequently ping plagiarism checkers. Working with mentors, teachers, or your fellow students to edit your essays is a far safer approach.
Other Application Components
An Ai tool is possibly useful to help you reduce character count for activities list items, but here too it is unlikely to know the best approach, or which details should be included and which can be safely cut. We recommend working with a mentor on this.
Your additional information section, if you need one, should be treated as an essay, and written by you alone. Again, this is a palace to give colleges key details about you and your context, details that an AI doesn’t know. At the end of the day, you are the only one who can write this section.
Final Thoughts
Generative AI is an amazing tool, and is capable of a great many things. As with every tool, however, it is not right for every situation; just as you cannot build a house with a hammer alone, so too does AI have situations where it is not the correct tool for the job. College applications are one such arena, and we hope this article has helped you understand why this is, and the potential pitfalls of misapplying such a powerful tool.
We do understand why students turn to AI of course. College applications are stressful, and take a lot of work; so many forms, so many essays, all coming on top of the schoolwork and activities you already have in your life. Any way to ease the load is seen as a wonderful thing. There is, however, a better way. Ivy Scholars works with students every year on the college admissions process, striving to make their lives easier. We have a well-worked system that lets you apply efficiently, and have seen great success helping students get into their top choice colleges. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can make your life easier.
