college essay using ai

Can ChatGPT get into Harvard? We tested its admissions essay.

ChatGPT’s release a year ago triggered a wave of panic among educators. Now, universities are in the midst of college application season, concerned that students might use the artificial intelligence tool to forge admissions essays.

But is a chatbot-created essay good enough to fool college admissions counselors?

To find out, The Washington Post asked a prompt engineer — an expert at directing AI chatbots — to create college essays using ChatGPT. The chatbot produced two essays: one responding to a question from the Common Application, which thousands of colleges use for admissions, and one answering a prompt used solely for applicants to Harvard University.

We presented these essays to a former Ivy League college admissions counselor, Adam Nguyen, who previously advised students at Harvard University and read admissions essays at Columbia University. We presented Nguyen with a control: a set of real college admissions essays penned by Jasmine Green, a Post intern who used them to get into Harvard University, where she is currently a senior.

We asked Nguyen to read the essays and spot which ones were produced by AI. The results were illuminating.

Can you figure out which one was written by a human?

Who wrote this?

Since kindergarten, I have evaluated myself from the reflection of my teachers. I was the clever, gifted child. I was a pleasure to have in class. I was driven and tenacious - but lazy? Unmotivated? No instructor had ever directed those harsh words at me. My identity as a stellar student had been stripped of its luster; I was destroyed.

Computer science and college admissions experts say that AI-created essays have some easy tells — helpful for admissions officers who are prepping for an uptick in ChatGPT-written essays.

Responses written by ChatGPT often lack specific details, leading to essays that lack supporting evidence for their points. The writing is trite and uses platitudes to explain situations, rather than delving into the emotional experience of the author. The essays are often repetitive and predictable, leaving readers without surprise or a sense of the writer’s journey. If chatbots produce content on issues of race, sex or socioeconomic status, they often employ stereotypes.

At first, Nguyen was impressed by the AI-generated essays: They were readable and mostly free of grammatical errors. But if he was reviewing the essay as part of an application package, he would’ve stopped reading.

“The essay is such a mediocre essay that it would not help the candidate’s application or chances,” he said in an interview. “In fact, it would probably diminish it.”

Here is how Nguyen evaluated ChatGPT’s essay.

Nguyen said that while AI may be sufficient to use for everyday writing, it is particularly unhelpful in creating college admissions essays. To start, he said, admissions offices are using AI screening tools to filter out computer-generated essays. (This technology can be inaccurate and falsely implicate students, a Post analysis found .)

But more importantly, admissions essays are a unique type of writing, he said. They require students to reflect on their life and craft their experiences into a compelling narrative that quickly provides college admissions counselors with a sense of why that person is unique.

“ChatGPT is not there,” he said.

Nguyen understands why AI might be appealing. College application deadlines often fall around the busiest time of the year, near winter holidays and end-of-semester exams. “Students are overwhelmed,” Nguyen said.

But Nguyen isn’t entirely opposed to using AI in the application process. In his current business, Ivy Link, he helps students craft college applications. For those who are weak in writing, he sometimes suggests they use AI chatbots to start the brainstorming process, he said.

For those who can’t resist the urge to use AI for more than just inspiration, there may be consequences.

“Their essays will be terrible,” he said, “and might not even reflect who they are.”

About this story

Jasmine Green contributed to this report.

The Washington Post worked with Benjamin Breen, an associate professor of history at the University of California in Santa Cruz who studies the impact of technological change, to create the AI-generated essays.

Editing by Karly Domb Sadof, Betty Chavarria and Alexis Sobel Fitts.

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ChatGPT prompting 101

ChatGPT can be a great study assistant, but the responses you get are only as good as the input you provide. Keep these four tips in mind to craft great ChatGPT prompts :

• Give ChatGPT a role to play
• Be precise and provide context
• Test and improve your prompts

ChatGPT prompts

100% ethical ChatGPT prompts

Write a research question

• Generate three possible research questions for an argumentative high school essay on the following topic: “The long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Brainstorm topic ideas

• Generate 10 questions to help me brainstorm topics for my college admission essay.

Quiz yourself

• I’m learning about [ insert topic here ]. Please create a practice test with 4 multiple-choice questions, each with 4 possible answers and solutions (show the solutions separately under the multiple-choice test).

Learn by metaphors and stories

• I ‘m learning about [ insert topic here ]. Convert the key lessons from this topic into engaging stories and metaphors to aid my memorization.

Find limitations

• What are some common limitations or critiques of research in the field of [ insert topic here ]?

Learn about a topic

• I want to learn about [ insert topic here ]. Identify and share the most important 20% of learnings from this topic that will help me understand 80% of it. Explain [ insert topic here ] to me without jargon and buzzwords, in the most simplified way possible.

Source recommendations

• What types of sources can I use to write an essay on the following research question? “ [insert research question here] ?”

Overview of arguments

• What are the main arguments or debates in the literature on [ insert topic here ]?

Develop an outline

• Develop an outline for an argumentative high school essay with the following research question: “ [insert research question here] ?”The essay will be about 4 pages long.

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Universities’ policies on AI

Based on our analysis of the top 100 US universities, it appears that the majority haven’t established clear-cut regulations concerning AI tools at this time. As a result, it is up to individual professors to determine what is permissible in their respective courses.

Check out policies in detail

Scribbr's stance on AI

We think educators should be open to the possibilities presented by AI-powered tools. Students should employ these tools in an honest and responsible way, using them to facilitate learning rather than to skip steps in the learning process.

You can use such tools in a responsible way that benefits your education during the research and writing process by relying on them for the following:

• Brainstorming and explore topics in an interactive way
• Assisting with programming and coding
• Developing research questions and paper outlines
• Asking for feedback on your own writing

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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

The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here .) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.

Sharples’s intent was to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity.” Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing , plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.

A chasm has existed between humanists and technologists for a long time. In the 1950s, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture, later the essay “The Two Cultures,” describing the humanistic and scientific communities as tribes losing contact with each other. “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.” Snow’s argument was a plea for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: Literary people were missing the essential insights of the laws of thermodynamics, and scientific people were ignoring the glories of Shakespeare and Dickens.

The rupture that Snow identified has only deepened. In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days , is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer . “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before. He probably didn’t imagine there was much to think about.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus , but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust .

These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.

Read: The humanities are in crisis

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major ?

The case for the value of humanities in a technologically determined world has been made before. Steve Jobs always credited a significant part of Apple’s success to his time as a dropout hanger-on at Reed College, where he fooled around with Shakespeare and modern dance, along with the famous calligraphy class that provided the aesthetic basis for the Mac’s design. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said . “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.

Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed . The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.

And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.

And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language, but also because there is more than just the possibility of disruption here. Natural-language processing can throw light on a huge number of scholarly problems. It is going to clarify matters of attribution and literary dating that no system ever devised will approach; the parameters in large language models are much more sophisticated than the current systems used to determine which plays Shakespeare wrote, for example . It may even allow for certain types of restorations, filling the gaps in damaged texts by means of text-prediction models. It will reformulate questions of literary style and philology; if you can teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must be able to inform you, in some way, about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.

The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

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University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Teachers need to work harder to get students to write and think for themselves.

Feature As word of students using AI to automatically complete essays continues to spread, some lecturers are beginning to rethink how they should teach their pupils to write.

Writing is a difficult task to do well. The best novelists and poets write furiously, dedicating their lives to mastering their craft. The creative process of stringing together words to communicate thoughts is often viewed as something complex, mysterious, and unmistakably human. No wonder people are fascinated by machines that can write too.

Unlike humans, language models don't procrastinate and create content instantly with a little guidance. All you need to do is type a short description, or prompt, instructing the model on what it needs to produce, and it'll generate a text output in seconds. So it should come as no surprise students are now beginning use these tools to complete school work.

Students are the perfect users: They need to write often, in large volumes, and are internet savvy. There are many AI-writing products to choose from that are easy to use and pretty cheap too. All of them lure new users with free trials, promising to make them better writers.

Monthly subscriptions for the most popular platform, Jasper, costs $40 per month to generate 35,000 words. Others, like Writesonic or Sudowrite, are cheaper at $10 per month for 30,000 words. Students who think they can use these products and get away with doing zero work, however, will probably be disappointed.

And then there's ChatGPT ...

Although AI can generate text with perfect spelling, great grammar and syntax, the content often isn't that good beyond a few paragraphs. The writing becomes less coherent over time with no logical train of thought to follow. Language models fail to get their facts right – meaning quotes, dates, and ideas are likely false. Students will have to inspect the writing closely and correct mistakes for their work to be convincing.

Prof: AI-assisted essays 'not good'

Scott Graham, associate professor at the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, tasked his pupils with writing a 2,200-word essay about a campus-wide issue using AI. Students were free to lightly edit and format their work with the only rule being that most of the essay had to be automatically generated by software.

In an opinion article on Inside Higher Ed, Graham said the AI-assisted essays were "not good," noting that the best of the bunch would have earned a C or C-minus grade. To score higher, students would have had to rewrite more of the essay using their own words to improve it, or craft increasingly narrower and specific prompts to get back more useful content.

"You're not going to be able to push a button or submit a short prompt and generate a ready-to-go essay," he told The Register .

The limits of machine-written text forces humans to carefully read and edit copy. Some people may consider using these tools as cheating, but Graham believes they can help people get better at writing.

Don't waste all your effort on the first draft....

"I think if students can do well with AI writing, it's not actually all that different from them doing well with their own writing. The main skills I teach and assess mostly happen after the initial drafting," he said.

"I think that's where people become really talented writers; it's in the revision and the editing process. So I'm optimistic about [AI] because I think that it will provide a framework for us to be able to teach that revision and editing better.

"Some students have a lot of trouble sometimes generating that first draft. If all the effort goes into getting them to generate that first draft, and then they hit the deadline, that's what they will submit. They don't get a chance to revise, they don't get a chance to edit. If we can use those systems to speed write the first draft, it might really be helpful," he opined.

Whether students can use these tools to get away with doing less work will depend on the assignment. A biochemistry student claimed on Reddit they got an A when they used an AI model to write "five good and bad things about biotech" in an assignment, Vice reported .

AI is more likely to excel at producing simple, generic text across common templates or styles.

Listicles, informal blog posts, or news articles will be easier to imitate than niche academic papers or literary masterpieces. Teachers will need to be thoughtful about the essay questions they set and make sure students' knowledge are really being tested, if they don't want them to cut corners.

Ask a silly question, you'll get a silly answer

"I do think it's important for us to start thinking about the ways that [AI] is changing writing and how we respond to that in our assignments -- that includes some collaboration with AI," Annette Vee, associate professor of English and director of the Composition Program at the University of Pittsburgh, told us.

"The onus now is on writing teachers to figure out how to get to the same kinds of goals that we've always had about using writing to learn. That includes students engaging with ideas, teaching them how to formulate thoughts, how to communicate clearly or creatively. I think all of those things can be done with AI systems, but they'll be done differently."

The line between using AI as a collaborative tool or a way to cheat, however, is blurry. None of the academics teaching writing who spoke to The Register thought students should be banned from using AI software. "Writing is fundamentally shaped by technology," Vee said.

"Students use spell check and grammar check. If I got a paper where a student didn't use these, it stands out. But it used to be, 50 years ago, writing teachers would complain that students didn't know how to spell so they would teach spelling. Now they don't."

Most teachers, however, told us they would support regulating the use of AI-writing software in education. Anna Mills, who teaches students how to write at a community college in the Bay Area, is part of a small group of academics beginning to rally teachers and professional organizations like the Modern Language Association into thinking about introducing new academic rules.

Critical thinking skills

Mills said she could see why students might be tempted to use AI to write their essays, and simply asking teachers to come up with more compelling assessments is not a convincing solution.

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

"We need policies. These tools are already pretty good now, and they're only going to get better. We need clear guidance on what's acceptable use and what's not. Where is the line between using it to automatically generate email responses and something that violates academic integrity?" she asked The Register .

"Writing is just not outputs. Writing and revising is a process that develops our thinking. If you skip that, you're going to be skipping that practice which students need.

"It's too tempting to use it as a crutch, skip the thinking, and skip the frustrating moments of writing. Some of that is part of the process of going deeper and wrestling with ideas. There is a risk of learning loss if students become dependent and don't develop the writing skills they need."

Mills was particularly concerned about AI reducing the need for people to think for themselves, considering language models carry forward biases in their training data. "Companies have decided what to feed it and we don't know. Now, they are being used to generate all sorts of things from novels to academic papers, and they could influence our thoughts or even modify them. That is an immense power, and it's very dangerous."

Lauren Goodlad, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, agreed. If they parrot what AI comes up with, students may end up more likely to associate Muslims with terrorism or mention conspiracy theories, for example.

Computers are alredy interfering and changing the ways we write. Goodlad referred to one incident when Gmail suggested she change the word "importunate" to "impatient" in an email she wrote.

"It's hard to teach students how to use their own writing as a way to develop their critical thinking and as a way to express knowledge. They very badly need the practice of articulating their thoughts in writing and machines can rob them of this. If people really do end up using these things all the way through school, if that were to happen it could be a real loss not just for the writing quality but for the thinking quality of a whole generation," she said.

Rules and regulation

Academic policies tackling AI-assisted writing will be difficult to implement. Opinions are divided on whether sentences generated by machines count as plagiarism or not. There is also the problem of being able to detect writing produced by these tools accurately. Some teachers are alarmed at AI's growing technical capabilities, whilst others believe its overhyped. Some are embracing the technology more than others.

Marc Watkins, lecturer, and Stephen Monroe, chair and assistant professor of writing and rhetoric, are working on building an AI writing pilot programme with the University of Mississippi's Academic Innovations Group. "As teachers, we are experimenting, not panicking," Monroe told The Register .

"We want to empower our students as writers and thinkers. AI will play a role… This is a time of exciting and frenzied development, but educators move more slowly and deliberately… AI will be able to assist writers at every stage, but students and teachers will need tools that are thoughtfully calibrated."

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Teachers are getting together and beginning to think about these tools, Watkins added. "Before we have any policy about the use of language models, we need to have sustained conversations with students, faculty, and administration about what this technology means for teaching and learning."

"But academia doesn't move at the pace of Big Tech. We're taking our time and slowly exploring. I don't think faculty need to be frightened. It's possible that these tools will have a positive impact on student learning and advancing equity, so let's approach AI assistants cautiously, but with an open mind."

Regardless of what policies universities may decide to implement in the future, AI presents academia with an opportunity to improve education now. Teachers will need to adapt to the technology if they want to remain relevant, and incentivise students to learn and think on their own with or without assistance from computers. ®

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AI for Essay Writing — Exploring Top 10 Essay Writers

Table of Contents

Let’s admit it — essay writing is quite a challenging task for students. Especially with the stringent deadlines, conducting research, writing , editing, and addressing to-and-fro reviews — consumes a whole lot of time and often becomes stressful. Therefore, students are always on the lookout for tools that speed up the essay writing process.

And that’s when AI writing tools make their debut! Using the best AI for essay writing makes the lives of students much easier by automatically generating the essay for them.

The rise in the popularity of artificial intelligence technology and deep learning has paved the way for the numerous AI writer tools available today. To help you understand the different types of AI tools and their benefits, we’ve uncovered the features of the top 10 AI essay generators in this article.

Let’s explore the tools and learn how they are transforming the tedious task of essay writing!

What is essay writing?

Essay writing is a part of academic writing that emphasizes formulating an idea or argument. The main objective of academic essay writing is to present a well-reasoned argument or idea. Evidence, analysis, and interpretation are the three major components of essay writing . It should have a logical structure to support the argument or idea of the essay so that it communicates clearly and concisely.

What is an AI essay writer?

AI essay writers is a tool that is designed to help students generate essays using machine learning techniques. They can be used to generate a full essay or generate a few parts of the essay, for example, essay titles, introduction, conclusion, etc.

Why should researchers use AI essay generators?

There are infinite benefits to using AI tools for writing unique essays, especially for researchers or students. Here are a few of them —

1. Saves time

Using best AI for essay writing has its own benefits. Students can take care of the research process while these AI tools write the essays for them. Be it an essay topic or a full-length essay generation, it saves a bunch of students' time.

2. Boosts productivity

Writing is a tedious task especially when you want to write an essay about a novel topic, that writer’s block starts haunting and your productivity gets affected. But, with AI, it’s the other way around and increases productivity by quickly generating the essays for you.

3. Enhances writing skills — Vocabulary and Style

Adopting the best AI essay writing AI tool not only help with creating essays but also help us hone our writing skills by giving proper suggestions about grammar, sentence structure, tone, style, and word choice.

4. Reduces stress

Students often undergo a lot of pressure and stress because of deadlines and submissions. With the best AI essay generator, they help you write essays smarter thereby reducing stress and fear in no time.

5. Facilitates multidisciplinary research

AI essay writing tools foster interdisciplinary study through their ability to scan and combine knowledge from multiple domains. That way, it helps us quickly get a grasp of new subjects or topics without a heavy-lifting process.

6. Cost-effective

Most of the AI essay writing tools have lower pricing and also allow certain discounts for students. So, it is also a cost-effective approach to use AI writing tools.

The Top AI Essay Writing Tools and Their Features

Several AI essay writers are available based on the types of essays one would want to generate. Now, let's quickly understand the top 10 AI writing tools that generate essays within just a few minutes.

1. PerfectEssayWriter.ai

It is one of the best AI for essay writing that not only creates an essay but also comes up with advanced features including plagiarism detection, auto-referencing, and contextual analysis. As a result, it generates coherent essays that are well-researched and properly cited. It is best recommended for creating academic essays and essay outlines.

How does PerfectEssayWriter work?

• Pick the right tool for your purpose — Go with an essay writer if you want to generate a full essay or choose the essay outliner if you want to create just the outline of the essay.
• Enter your specific conditions and preferences. Add essay topic, academic level, essay type, number of pages, and special instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate” and wait for the result
• Once you have the essay generated, you can review, edit, or refine it and then download it.
• Generates a large chunk of data up to 2000 words
• Output is provided within 90 seconds
• Provides a plethora of other tools like Citation generator, grammar checker, thesis statement generator, and more
• Comes with 10+ essay writing templates
• Subscription-based and not a free tool
• Human review is a mandate

2. Essaybot - Personalized AI writing

Essaybot is the product of a reputed online essay-writing service, MyPerfectWords. It is meant to enhance academic essay writing and streamline the tasks of students. Its user friendly website makes it an instant and hassle-free essay generation saving a lot of time and effort for students.

How does Essaybot work?

• Enter the essay title or topic
• Click on “start writing” and wait for it to generate a well-reasoned essay.
• The tools come for free
• No sign-up is required
• 100% unique and High-quality output
• Very limited features that lack advanced functionalities

3. FreeEssayWriter.net

FreeEssayWriter is an organization that provides essay-writing services to students worldwide. It has an AI essay typer tool — that helps you generate essays instantly. What sets this essay typer apart is its initiative to help students with their free essay writer providing the students with a 2-page free essay.

How does FreeEssayWriter.net work?

It works similarly to Essaybot, input the title or the topic of your essay and wait for it to generate the essay. They also have an option to edit and download a free version of the generated essay instantly.

• Provides high-quality essays and is considered to be one of the reliable and trusted sources of information
• Students can improve their writing skills and learn more about essays by referring to their free essay database or sources
• Priority customer support is available 24*7
• The site is not optimized for mobile devices
• The quality of the essay output could still be improved

4. MyEssayWriter

This AI essay writing tool is no exception in terms of generating a high-quality essay. You can generate essays for various topics depending on the background of your research study. Be it academic or non-academic essay writing, this tool comes in handy.

How does MyEssay Writer work?

Add your preferences and then click on generate. It will give you a high-quality and 100% unique essay crafted based on your requirements.

• The tool comes for free — no subscription is required
• Knows for its consistency in the quality and the tone of the essay output
• Also has a paid custom writing service that provides human-written essays
• Might not provide quality output for complex and technical-based keywords or topic

5. College Essay AI

College essay AI stands unique as an ai writing tool as it not only uses an AI-based algorithm to generate essays but it also backs up the output as it is reviewed and approved by a team of professional experts. It is the best AI essay writing tool for college and graduate students where the output adheres to the graduate students' essay writing guidelines.

How does the College Essay AI generator work?

• Input the required information — essay topic, academic level, number of pages, sources, and specific instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate essay” and wait for the output
• Conduct plagiarism and grammar check
• Download the essay
• High-level output for academic essay writing
• Pocket-friendly premium plans
• Doesn’t provide multiple sets of templates
• Not quite suitable for non-academic essay writing

6. Jasper AI

Jasper AI has been the oldest player in the game of AI content writing. Fast forward to now, its features have been magnified with the inception of natural language processing algorithms and that’s how they are helping students write their essays as well. However, Jasper is the best AI tool for non-academic writing projects like content writing or creative writing.

How does Jasper AI work?

• Choose a template — if you are about to write an essay, go with the “document”
• Add your preferences
• Click “compose” and get the output
• Generates the essays instantly
• Provides well-structured output according to the tone and style of your preferences
• Not quite suitable for academic writing essays

7. Textero AI

Textero AI provides a few writing tools for students that facilitate their various academic papers and writing projects. Its essay generator helps you generate ideas for a full-length essay based on the topic and also suggests new topic ideas or thesis statement ideas for your academic assignments.

How does Textero AI work?

• Click on “Essay Generator” located on the LHS (Left-hand Side)
• Input the title and description based on which you want to generate the essay
• Pick the right citation style
• Click “generate” and wait for the output
• It also provides other tools like an outline generator, and summary generator and has an AI research assistant that answers all your questions relevant to the research
• The output is 100% unique and plagiarism and error-free
• Might fail to provide an essay focussed on complex or technical topics

8. Quillbot

Though Quillbot is essentially built for paraphrasing and summarizing tasks. It comes as a rescue when you have to revamp, improvise, or refine your already-composed essay. Its co-writer helps you transform your thoughts and ideas and make them more coherent by rephrasing them. You can easily customize your text based on the customization options available.

How does Quillbot Paraphraser work?

• Import or copy the content
• Click on “Paraphrase” “Summarize” or “Suggest text” based on your requirement
• Make the required customizations and save the document.
• Offers a plethora of tools required for students
• Both free and premium plans are available
• Enhances vocabulary and language skills
• Limited customization options with the free plan
• Only supports the English language

9. SciSpace Paraphraser

SciSpace is the best AI tool that helps you fine-tune your essay. If you feel your essay writing needs AI suggestions to improve the language, vocabulary, writing styles, and tone of your essay, SciSpace is at your rescue. It has more customized options than Quillbot and improves your essay by rephrasing it according to the required or preferred writing style, and tone. This is a very good alternative to Quillbot.

How does SciSpace Paraphrasing work?

• Simply paste the content to the screen
• Choose the length and variation properly
• Select the language
• Click “Paraphrase”
• Has 22 custom tones and all of them are available even on the free plan
• Supports 75+ languages
• Comes with an AI-detection report for English paraphrase output
• Delay in the output

10. ChatGPT

It would be unfair if we talk about AI tools and do not enlist ChatGPT. When it comes to automated essay writing tasks, ChatGPT is not trivial. With proper prompts, you can automate the essay writing process and generate a well-crafted and coherent essay. However, the quality and the accuracy cannot be trusted as the model hallucinates and doesn’t include sources.

How does ChatGPT work?

• Create a prompt based on your requirement
• Ask ChatGPT to write an essay about your topic, specify conditions and preferences
• Click enter and wait for the essay
• Comes for free
• Cannot rely on the output as the model hallucinates
• Lacks the upgraded features that other essay-writing tools have

Concluding!

Writing essays can be a real struggle. But, the inception of the best AI essay-generation tools makes the entire writing process a lot easier and smoother. However, you should be extra vigilant while relying on these tools and consciously use them only as a technological aid. Because over-reliance on these AI tools could diminish student's writing skills and the user can become more gripped by the tools. So, use it wisely without affecting your knowledge and skills.

You can explore the above tools whenever you need any help with essay writing, and reap the benefits of them without compromising on the quality of your writing.

And! If you're stuck exploring multiple research papers or want to conduct a comprehensive literature review , you know which tool to use? Yes, it's SciSpace Literature Review, our AI-powered workspace, which is meant to make your research workflow easier. Plus, it also comes with SciSpace Copilot , our AI research assistant that answers any question that you may have about the research paper.

If you haven't used it yet, you can use it here !

Choosing the best AI for writing long-form essays depends on your requirements. Here are the top 5 tools that help you create long-form and college essays —

1. Free Essay Writer AI

2. College Essay AI

3. My Essay Writer

4. Textero AI

5. Perfect Essay Writer

The Perfect Essay Writer AI and Textero AI are the two best AI essay generators that help you write the best essays.

ChatGPT is not specifically built to assist you with essay writing, however, you can use the tool to create college essays and long-form essays. It’s important to review, fact-check the essay, and refer to the sources properly.

Essaybot is a free AI essay generator tool that helps you create a well-reasoned essay with just a click.

Unless your university permits it, using AI essay generators or writing tools to write your essay can be considered as plagiarism.

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The Right Way to Use AI to Ace Your College Admissions Essay

Keith Nickolaus

EdPro Communications, Crimson Education

18 min read

Introduction:

If you’re trying to figure out how to write the best college admissions essay possible — and the “right” way to use AI in the process — congratulations on taking the next step in your college application journey. And, you probably know that the essay ranks pretty high when it comes to admissions decisions, right? So, it makes sense to use every tool and avenue at your disposal to ace the essay… Which brings us to today’s topic: why it’s almost essential to use the newest and best AI tools out there to make the writing process richer, faster, more fun and creative, and more effective. In this post we’ll cover various AI tools, especially ChatGPT, along with some other AI tools that may be far better for the final revision steps. We’ll explore what these tools can and can’t do, how they work, how to use them, and we’ll cover the ethical ins and outs.

AI and Essay Writing — Overview

Because AI is powerful but also very new, it’s getting lots of attention, both good and bad… If you’re applying to a top college, it’s a good guess you’re all about embracing technology, but you have questions or doubts when it comes to using tools such as ChatGPT.

Maybe you’re worried about the limits of using AI for a very personal essay format, or about ethical choices ,because you’ve heard some schools have banned students from using ChatGPT for academic writing.

In this blog post we’ll cut through the noise and explore the benefits and risks of using AI tools.

You’ll see that embracing AI doesn’t have to be about cheating, short cuts, or any machine writing your essay for you…

In fact, as we explore different AI tools and ideas for using them effectively for a college admissions essay, we’re going to keep an unwavering focus on how these resources can help you craft an inventive, memorable, and authentic college essay , because at this point in your journey there’s a lot at stake, especially if you’re applying to the more competitive schools…

Introducing ChatGPT: Your Powerful New Writing Wizard…

Before we get into how to use ChatGPT, and the right way — to amplify your writing while avoiding downsides and risks — let’s quickly take a look at what ChatGPT is, what it does, and how it can be just like having a great writing assistant write at your fingertips (oops, we mean right at your fingertips…).

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a powerful language model that can generate human-like text and respond to an almost infinite variety of requests or instructions — called prompts — that make it a virtual secret weapon for helping you supercharge your creative process and power through the writing process.

But before we go any further, let’s be clear: you don’t have to use AI tools to write your essay… If writing is your passion, you may be confident already about your own approach and your own skills…

But for too long, too many bright and able students have struggled with the process of putting pen to paper and thoughts into words. For most people, let’s just say it, writing is anything but exhilarating. It’s more like a drawn out struggle that even after all the effort and stress still leaves them wondering if they’ve really succeeded in the end or not…

The pain is real… Technology to the rescue!

Embracing AI tools not only helps you learn about new forms of game-changing technology, but it has the power to make you a much happier and more creative writer! And, before we’re done, we’ll see that ChatGPT is only one tool to consider and can be effectively combined with others that are more specialized and widely used by professional writers.

ChatGPT Is Prompt-Driven AI With Versatile Applications

ChatGPT is designed to respond to your questions, instructions, commands, or requests — referred to as prompts — making it just like having your own personal writing coach.

Without your prompts and your prompting, ChatGPT is merely a silent bystander! This means you’re always in control, and it also means it’s helpful to understand how to formulate effective prompts and tailor them to the kind of writing help you need for different steps in the writing process .

Imagine for example, you’re just stuck. You don’t know where to start, or you have writer’s block... Or, forget writing anything… you’re just trying to figure out how to approach the initial brainstorming ! Guess what, ChatGPT really can help!

Some people think ChatGPT just writes conventional text. The fact is it can be used to get ideas, to circumvent writer’s block, to do research, and even generate your own writing templates or models…

But, before we get into some specific tips and tricks for using ChatGPT and explore some other powerful AI tools, let’s get real about the practical and ethical concerns you’re probably wondering about: whether AI tools really can help you — especially with this highly personal content — and whether it’s even ethical to use AI for college essays …

The Poison of Cheating vs. the Pearls of Integrity, Creativity, and Authenticity

ChatGPT has no ethical understanding, only humans do (for now at least!).

And, long before ChatGPT, there were plenty of ways to cheat: you could ask a friend to write your college essay for you, pay someone to write your essay professionally, or find sample essays online and plagiarize them…

Cheating with ChatGPT — Easy as 1-2-3…

It’s really the same with ChatGPT. You can choose to cheat, just like before. Here’s how: you prompt ChatGPT as needed so it spits out an artificial essay which you cut and paste right into the submission pane for your prospective college, and press submit! Easy as 1-2-3…?

Maybe, but maybe not — especially if the result is a mediocre essay with little that’s genuine and authentic, or one that stands out not as being unique and creative but as being machine generated!

For both practical and ethical reasons, cheating is probably the last thing you want to use AI for!

The fact is cheating has always been the easy way, even if it seems easier now than before.

And remember… whenever and however you cheat others, the person you’re cheating the most may actually be YOU…

That’s right, you’re cheating yourself out of the opportunity for introspection, for building deeper self-awareness, for learning how to articulate in a public forum who you are, what you stand for, and how your values drive your decision making — hmmm… sounds like valuable qualities to develop and use in leadership roles too…

You get the point: to cheat or not to cheat — it’s not about chatbots or parsing each school’s student honor code… It’s really the same as before ChatGPT — cheating has always been and continues to be about YOU and about YOUR choices.

Everyday offers new opportunities to choose poorly or choose wisely: to sell yourself short or to grow and challenge yourself, to embrace technology or stick with the old and familiar… And, it’s not just about one essay, you’ll continue facing and making choices like these everyday in college and beyond.

The other very practical risk of “cheating” with ChatGPT is you’re probably not going to get an essay that really stands out, especially at highly selective colleges and universities! ChatGPT just doesn’t have the nuanced modeling that makes it anything close to a substitute for a real author, especially for this kind of highly subjective and personalized content!

When it comes to the right stuff of memorable personal essay writing, only you can create that through your own reflective, step-by-step creative process.

How to Put ChatGPT to Work for Your College Essay

There’s lots of creative ways to use ChatGPT… And we’ll show you examples in a minute. But we encourage you to experiment with your own prompts and find your own tricks later on, once you get familiar with how it works.

In the meantime here are some of the many ways you can use ChatGPT to work through the writing process:

• Jumpstart your brainstorming or get unstuck anytime during the writing process
• Get ideas for different ways to structure your essay or for how to start or end your essay
• Create your own relevant sentence starters or paragraph templates
• Explore ideas for creating a narrative style and voice that really fits your personality
• Use ChatGPT samples that you don’t like as another way to home in on the personal look and feel you want to impart to your essay

The Magic of Prompts

Getting something from ChatGPT always starts with a “prompt.”

Prompts can take the form of questions, commands, requests, or instructions

Prompts can include multiple layers of instructions and commands that serve as guidelines for what kind of content you want ChatGPT to generate, including guidelines for type of writing (genre), format (such as list, business letter, essay, or blog post…), voice, style, tone, length , and so forth.

The interface is fairly intuitive and conversational, so you will need to put some thought into what instructions or prompts you use, but you can use natural and direct conversational language when typing the prompts

Choosing What to Put in A Prompt …

In the most basic prompt, you’ll probably at least want to give ChatGPT two essential guidelines for:

WHAT ACTION to perform, and

WHAT FORMAT to use

Sample Prompt:

Share ideas for how to format or structure a college application essay. Use a bullet list format .

In this prompt we’re asking ChatGPT to share ideas for formatting a college application essay and to use a bullet list format so we can see a skeleton of the structure, or limit it to key headings.

Here’s a slightly abbreviated version of the content a simple prompt like this produces:

Sure! Here are the main bullet points for formatting a college application essay :

• Introduction
• Thesis Statement
• Body Paragraphs
• Anecdotes and Examples
• Reflection and Growth
• Academic and Extracurricular Achievements
• Passions and Interests
• Future Goals
• Formatting and Style

The list on its own doesn’t have much immediate value, and it’s a little nonsensical, probably because “formating,” the word we chose for the prompt, can mean different things. Also sticking a “thesis statement” at the beginning of your personal essay may not be the most effective or creative approach, especially if you decide to use more of a narrative structure…

Nonetheless, thinking a little outside the box, let’s consider what you can use the list for:

• Getting unstuck — select items from the list to use as prompts for jumpstarting a really productive brainstorming session
• Weighing alternative essay structures — such as deciding if you want to evoke and combine, in a montage structure for example, some significant “anecdotes and examples” as a way to add authenticity and context to “inner reflections on personal growth” that you want to share with the reader
• Using the item “thesis statement” as a creative prompt in order to challenge yourself to clearly articulate a main idea that will unify your essay: If I had to write a thesis statement for an essay that’s about ME, what would it be?…How would I sum it up in one or two sentences?…

Let’s look at one more example of a creative way to use ChatGPT for help with a different stage of the writing process.

In this example, in addition to telling ChatGPT WHAT ACTION to perform and WHAT FORMAT to use, let’s add instructions for VOICE , STYLE , and LENGTH .

Write about the influence of a wise teacher who taught the value of > curiosity. Use an informal style and a personal narrative voice. Make > it 200 words or less.

What you’ll get will be entirely made up and have no facts related to your own personal experience, of course. So your first question might be: what good is this going to do me ?

Truth be told, ChatGPT created a mostly artificial chunk of writing in response to the prompt we gave it. But, the text can be quickly edited and turned into a handy writing template .

In this instance, because our prompt guided for something like an anecdote, the template in question provides ideas for structuring and narrating an anecdote from your life and for connecting it to your own personal reflection or insight . Very on point for a personal narrative.

With a little editing, the anecdote template looked like this:

When I was…. there was a teacher named ….. He was like a …. who always …. On one day that I still remember, he walked into our class with a … and > said to the class “Today …” Inside the box were … during the rest of the class we …. What surprised me most was … By the end I realized …. > Thanks to Mr. Anderson … I …

Not the most eye-popping or authentic-sounding writing, but the template does give you a solid if basic idea of how to concisely narrate a past personal experience that’s connected to a larger personal reflection or insight.

And, if you don’t like the voice and style, that’s useful too! Knowing how you don’t want your own essay to sound can often get you closer to figuring out what voice and style do match your personality!

Remember, you can also prompt your virtual assistant to generate a new version, with or without modifying the prompt.

For example, if the voice seems too simplistic, experiment with adding new guidelines to your prompts , such as: Imitate the writing style of a student writing a personal essay for a college English class .

As you can see, you can get pretty creative with the prompts — so have some fun, but don't get carried away, you have an essay to finish!

What ChatGPT Can’t Do

As you can see ChatGPT could make it easy to cheat, but using ChatGPT isn’t the same as cheating or anything close to it.

Using ChatGPT the right ways is about embracing fast-paced technology innovation, just like you do for most of your other academic work : to help you animate the writing process, get unstuck and get new ideas more quickly, and to build your repertoire of writing formats and styles while you’re at it!

But let’s not forget to talk about what ChatGPT can’t do …

It won’t be very successful at artfully narrating and connecting genuinely personal life experiences and circumstances into a memorable personal statement. It will have limitations when it comes to articulating the personal, underlying motives and values guiding your college, major, and career preferences.

Sure, you can add more layers to your prompt to get more targeted content, but ChatGPT just doesn’t have the depth of human experience to appreciate and seize upon nuances of context, culture, emotion, and language that will make your essay sparkle because your personality and identity shine through in a ways that are genuine, vulnerable, and unique.

The Power of Experiential Insights: The Role of College Admissions Counselors (the Human Kind)

College admissions counselors are also “pre-trained” — kind of like their AI counterparts — to evaluate language forms and models in a college admissions essay! Of course counselors are not machines, but they have capabilities of their own that are a lot like advanced machine learning — knowledge and experience !

Although AI is awesome, getting human input for your essay is also strongly recommended. Your college counselor can offer support that is empathic, nuanced, and based on mature understanding and professional experiences and insights.

Hopefully you’re getting the bigger picture now: a tool like ChatGPT has great features, but also some hard-stop limitations. AI can never (for today at least!) be an adequate substitute for human experience and insight!

That said, ChatGPT is only one among a number of virtual assistants out there.

So, in addition to ChatGPT, and in addition to qualified humans, like a college and career counselor or academic advisor, you can also take advantage of more highly specialized AI writing platforms . These tools can be especially useful during the revision phase, when your draft has a lot of content and structure but you’re looking for more nuanced and targeted feedback to get you over the finish line.

Write Like a Pro — Specialized and Genre-Specific AI Copy Editing Tools

When you’ve reached the revision phase, you may want to use AI-powered tools trained for more specific use cases.

Powerful Tools for Feedback on the Mechanics of Your Essay

You can boost your own late-stage revision and proofreading prowess with high-performance tools designed specifically for helping you thoroughly review all of the mechanics of your writing — stuff like syntax, usage, punctuation, and spelling…

Don’t think these tools are only for inexperienced writers. In fact, these tools are used most widely by highly skilled writers — writers who understand the need for input from an outside copy editor, even if it’s a machine that’s doing the work!

Two of the most widely used tools are 1. Grammarly and 2. Ginger .

Both tools offer a basic version that’s free, and a premium version for paid subscription.

These tools have powerful features that help you detect grammar errors, imprecise or clumsy phrasing, run-on sentences, spelling errors, usage errors, and more.

Here’s the point: there’s a lot riding on your admissions essay, and even professional writers routinely get either a human or an AI tool to help them review all of the mechanics of their writing...

You probably don’t need a professional copy editor to help you complete your own college essay, but tools like Grammarly or Ginger and other tools out there like them, are a fast and inexpensive way to get exactly the kind of feedback you’d get from a diligent and highly qualified copy editor!

And, as with ChatGPT, remember, you’re still in control! These copy editing tools have a simple and intuitive interface. They highlight possible corrections or improvements, helping you take a fresh look at the mechanics of your writing, but leaving it up to you to make any final changes.

To the Next Level! — Genre-specific AI Writing Tools

One thing that tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly have in common is that they’re designed to help all writers, with virtually every kind of writing .

This makes them popular and versatile, but can you imagine a tool optimized for genre-specific editing feedback — even one designed for personal essay writing in particular, or exclusively for college admissions essays?

Imagine too that the same tool would give you feedback on mechanics, structure, and content?

Tools like this actually do exist, but they’re too targeted to have a big user base, but if you’re writing a college admissions essay they can be a perfect match.

One genre-specific AI tool that’s optimized for college admissions essays alone is called AdmitYogi AI Essay Revision Tool .

If you want an AI co-pilot that will get into the nitty-gritty nuances of the college admissions essay format AdmitYogi AI Essay Revision Tool can do that. It even gives you some options to align the feedback with specific types of common college essay prompts! It's almost like you’ve got your own college counselor looking over your shoulder at your essay draft with you.

AdmitYogi AI Essay Revision Tool is an AI platform that combines features of ChatGPT and Grammarly along with more advanced AI “training” for targeted essay feedback in a college admissions context.

You don’t need to download anything because it’s all accessible online 24/7, making it simple and convenient. Right now, we're in our beta testing phase, which means you can use all of Admityogi Essay's features absolutely for free!

Again, as with the other tools, you’re in charge. AdmitYogi AI Essay Revision Tool gives you feedback on the three critical components of your essay, coded in a way that’s easy to follow, using natural language, and guided by actual rubrics constructed by knowledgeable admissions experts.

Over The Finish Line and Beyond…

When you combine the best AI has to offer along with some human insights from trustworthy family, friends, and counselors, you’re almost sure to produce an exceptional admissions essay and get results beyond your initial expectations.

That’s the way it should be.

After all, by doing your research, embracing technology, and taking advantage of input from both bots and humans, you’re already demonstrating the kind of resourcefulness that will serve you well in college… And, you should be rewarded with a stellar essay for your efforts — an essay that should definitely help you get into your top-choice schools!

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Admitted students talk role of ChatGPT in essays amid changing admissions policies

Princeton admitted students to the Class of 2028 on Dec. 14 as part of its Single Choice Early Action round.

Louisa gheorghita / the daily princetonian.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is receiving a growing focus at Princeton, serving as the subject of the Class of 2028 Pre-Read and spurring the creation of the Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative (PLI) in September 2023. ChatGPT’s growing popularity has recently sparked conversation about its place in the classroom and whether it can be accurately detected .

Questions about the role of AI in essay writing and the weight essays should hold in the admissions process remain, during an admissions cycle already upturned by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action. These concerns have already resulted in Duke University’s decision to abandon the practice of scoring applicant essays.

The newly admitted Class of 2028 is the first Princeton class to have access to this controversial technology during the admissions process. The Daily Princetonian spoke to admits on their perspective on the usage of generative AI during the college application process, and a professor with expertise in the field.

All three incoming members of the Class of 2028 interviewed by the ‘Prince’ said that they had not used any form of AI in their essays, though one student experimented with AI during the essay-writing process.

They expressed that they felt the personal focus of the essay made it an ill-fit for AI assistance. 

“I don’t really know what it would help with because you’re supposed to write about yourself, and it doesn’t know anything about you,” Jacob Emerson ’28 said.

Jamie Creasi ’28 expressed a similar sentiment. “There’s no way for it to communicate the challenges I’ve experienced, or what kind of life I have,” she said.

Hemant Sharma ’28 described his experience with attempting to use AI. He found that his essay “lost its emotional touch” so he ended up reverting to his old essay. “[ChatGPT] just made everything worse,” he said.

The University shares this position. In a written statement to the ‘Prince,’ University Spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote, “An essay generated by an AI platform is unlikely to be as rich and nuanced as a student’s own words.”

The ‘Prince’ spoke with Associate Professor of Computer Science Arvind Narayanan about ChatGPT's writing abilities. Professor Narayanan said that while AI may be capable of writing a passable essay, it likely would not be any easier than writing an essay without AI assistance. 

Professor Narayanan said, “If the use of AI assistance causes [the college admissions essay] to matter even less, I see it as an entirely positive development,” finding the essay to be “an exercise in performative authenticity.” 

The new admits differed in opinion about regulating generative AI use in the college admissions process. Creasi likened the usage of ChatGPT to a calculator which helps conduct simple calculations in order to allow a focus on more complex tasks. 

“At first, people saw calculators as a way of cheating because you don’t have to do a lot of the equations that you once did or use your mind in the same sort of way. But since then, we’ve adapted to calculators … we can do higher level math or physics,” he said.

Conversely, Sharma felt that detection of AI usage in a college essay should be allowed, stating, “I think there should be at least a minor punishment because it’s easier if we curb it now so that it doesn’t hurt anyone later in the future.” 

However, even if schools agreed to take action against students suspected of unauthorized AI use, Professor Narayanan believes AI-identification technology is not at the “level of accuracy that would make it justifiable to penalize applicants for using AI assistance.”

Although the University did not respond with explicit rules about the use of generative AI in the college application process, Morrill wrote that all applicants “sign a statement acknowledging all information in the application (including the essays) is their own work.”

Claire Meng is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

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

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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.” Toby Reed, senior at Fremont High in Oakland

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.” Katherine Goyette, computer science coordinator at the california department of education

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.”

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College Admissions in the Age of AI 

April 12, 2024

Authored By:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. You’re likely seeing it mentioned on the news and social media; it’s probably even been a topic in your classes or school assemblies. But there’s also a lot of misinformation about AI and, you guessed it, that can have dangerous implications for your college application. 

We’ll take a closer look at how college admissions and online applications in general are evolving in the age of AI as you prepare for the process yourself. 

Is AI Ethical?  

Let’s start with the big picture first: What is AI really, and is it ethical?  

AI is a technology that allows computers and machines to simulate human intelligence. For example, it enables human functions like problem-solving, interpreting speech, playing games, and identifying patterns.  

Generative AI, a form of AI, has been the topic of recent headlines, and is affecting schools, and more, worldwide. Generative AI can generate text, images, or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts. One of the most controversial forms of generative AI is ChatGPT.  

ChatGPT was created with large language models, also known as language-related data, to be able to create written thoughts or conversations based on topic and level of detail, format, length, style, and language.  

As you likely already know, users can send a prompt to ChatGPT, give it specific directions, and it will generate the content you request. Generative AI is also popping up in other industries, especially in healthcare.  

While it may seem like a sudden, new technology on the rise, some AI has been used for decades. AI can be as simple as a computer game like checkers; remember, this is a technology that allows computers and machines to simulate human intelligence, like playing games.  

Now, back to our first question: is AI ethical? The short answer is that… it’s complicated. While some AI technologies have helped create more efficient systems and led to significant progress across industries, some AI implications are troublesome. Many global leaders and prominent scientists are concerned about the impact of generative AI – what does it mean for human creativity? For privacy? Bias, disinformation, and more?  

Exhaustive debates are happening about AI’s ethical implications, but before we get in over our heads, let’s cover exactly what AI means for you in the college admissions process. 

For starters, keep in mind that ChatGPT is a slippery slope in academia. Some students may be abusing ChatGPT and entirely relying on it to help them complete their academic work, like essay writing, exams, and more. Trusting ChatGPT is dangerous territory. Much research has shown that ChatGPT can generate disinformation; it won’t always answer prompts correctly.  

Plus, if you entirely rely on ChatGPT to help you through academic work, you’re doing yourself a disservice – the more you depend on a piece of technology to do your thinking for you, the more you’ll struggle when it comes time to do it on your own. And this counts toward the college admissions process, too. You also risk that you won’t come across as your authentic, unique self and stand out amongst your peers. Which brings us to our next heads up. 

Do College Admissions Check for AI?

Yes, college admissions teams do check for AI, especially when it comes to the personal essay and supplemental writing prompts.  

College admissions teams use your application to get to know you. And one of the main ways they get a glimpse into your life and personality is through your writing. Your high school transcript certainly doesn’t demonstrate as much about you as your personal essay does!  

If you’re using an AI tool like ChatGPT to answer personal prompts, college admissions teams won’t get to know you. Not only will your writing style and tone of voice evaporate, you also can’t trust ChatGPT to describe your personal life and truly explain obstacles you may have faced, lessons you’ve learned, and influential people who have helped shape you.  

Read More: What Is the Most Important Factor in College Admissions?   

How Do College Admissions Check for AI?  

“What AI detector do college admissions use?” It depends. Some college admissions teams use AI-detection tools that can identify specific patterns and compare them to existing content. Remember, ChatGPT generates content that blends other data points and existing information, so sometimes the technology repeats itself or provides similar information to different users. Talk about getting lost in the crowd. 

College admissions teams are also made up of trained professionals who closely examine all aspects of college applications, so they are well-suited to see if something looks disingenuous. Detecting ChatGPT content is becoming a skill not only in college admissions and academia, but in the professional world too – various clues and patterns in the content alert reviewers.  

Our advice? It’s better to be safe than sorry. While you can turn to technology if you need inspiration, don’t entirely rely on AI or ChatGPT to write your personal college application essay, or more, for you. You’re much better off being yourself and attempting it on your own than getting caught trying to pass something off that’s not your own.  

Better yet, if you’re really feeling stuck when it comes to the writing portions of your college application, lean on your support system to help you. Seek out teachers or your high school guidance counselor for advice; your family and even your friends can help inspire your writing. And believe it or not, you can use ChatGPT as a tool (not the entire solution) to help, too.  

Check out some ethical ways you can utilize ChatGPT to help steer you in the right direction :   

• Generate ideas and brainstorm: Ask for a list of additional writing prompts or topics if you’re having difficulty getting started.  
• Understand complicated topics: Try asking for definitions or more context about specific issues if you’re confused or overwhelmed by your writing prompts.  
• Summarize research: If you’ve discovered some research that you’d like to include in your writing, ask ChatGPT for a quick summary to help you dissect it faster.  
• Analyze sentiment and tone: Ask ChatGPT to analyze the sentiment and tone of your writing if you’re unsure and want an additional review.  

Here’s the bottom line: College admissions teams can’t learn about you from a computer; try your best to complete your college application on your own so you can really impress them.  

CIEE Admissions Teams

Whether you’re heading straight to college after high school or considering a CIEE study abroad program for high school graduates , you’ll need to submit an online application. Our admissions teams at CIEE want to get to know you, too!  

If you’re struggling with anything on your CIEE application, we offer personal support and understand that enlisting some additional guidance (whether human or computer) might be needed. As with the college admissions process, we suggest utilizing different resources as tools for help on your application, not something to rely on entirely.   

We want to know you and your motivations for participating in something like CIEE Gap Year Abroad or CIEE First Year Abroad . Are you passionate about other cultures? Have you always dreamed of going to Japan? Or Australia? Tell us what excites you; we guarantee you won’t need AI for assistance.  

The college landscape and the many emerging technologies are always evolving, but one thing remains true: you deserve an application, a college experience, and a study abroad program as unique as you! You got this.  

SUBMIT A CIEE APPLICATION   

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What Students Are Saying About Learning to Write in the Age of A.I.

Does being able to write still matter when chatbots can do it for us? Teenagers weigh in on an essay from Opinion.

By The Learning Network

With artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT that can generate prose for us, how much should we care about learning to write — and write well?

In “ Our Semicolons, Ourselves ,” the Opinion contributor Frank Bruni argues that, for a multitude of reasons, communicating effectively is a skill we should still take seriously. “Good writing burnishes your message,” he writes. “It burnishes the messenger, too.”

We asked teenagers what they thought: Does learning to be a good writer still matter in the age of A.I.? Or will the technology someday replace the need for people to learn how to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard?

Take a look at their conversation below, which explores the benefits of learning to express oneself, the promise and perils of chatbots, and what it means to be a writer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the conversation on our writing prompts this week, including students from Glenbard North High School in Carol Stream, Ill.; Hinsdale Central High School in Hinsdale, Ill. and New Rochelle High School in New Rochelle, N.Y .

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

Many students agreed with Mr. Bruni that learning to write is important. Some pointed to the practical reasons.

When you write any sort of persuasive essay or analysis essay, you learn to communicate your ideas to your audience. This skill can then be applied to your daily life. Whether it’s talking to your teachers, writing an email to your boss, or sending a text message to your friends, writing and communication is a fundamental ability that is needed to clearly and concisely express yourself. This is something that A.I. cannot help you with.

— Mara F.R., Hinsdale

In order to write, we must first be able to think on our own which allows us to be self-sufficient. With the frequent use of A.I., our minds become reliant on given information rather than us thinking for ourselves. I absolutely believe that learning to be a good writer still matters even in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

— Jordyne, Ellisville

I firmly believe that learning good writing skills develops communication, creativity, and problem-solving skills. A.I. can also be used as a tool; I have used it to ask practice questions, compare my answers, and find different/better ways to express myself. Sure, having my essay written for me in seconds is great, but come time for an interview or presentation later on in my life I’ll lack the confidence and ability to articulate my thoughts if I never learn how.

— CC, San Luis Obispo County

I, being a senior, have just finished my college applications. Throughout the process, I visited several essay help websites, and each one stressed this fact: essay readers want to hear a student’s voice. ChatGPT can write well-structured essays in two minutes, but these essays have no voice. They are formulaic and insipid — they won’t help a student get into UCLA. To have a chance, her essays must be eloquent and compelling. So, at least until AI writing technology improves, a student must put in the work, writing and rewriting until she has produced an essay that tells readers who she is.

— Cole, Central Coast, CA

Others discussed the joy and satisfaction that comes with being able to express oneself.

While AI has its advantages, it can’t replicate the satisfaction and authenticity which comes from writing by yourself. AI uses the existing ideas of others in order to generate a response. However, the response isn’t unique and doesn’t truly represent the idea the way you would. When you write, it causes you to think deeply about a topic and come up with an original idea. You uncover ideas which you wouldn’t have thought of previously and understand a topic for more than its face value. It creates a sense of clarity, in which you can generate your own viewpoint after looking at the different perspectives. Another example is that the feeling of writing something by yourself generates feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. The process of doing research about a topic for hours, to then come up with your own opinion. Or the feeling of having to use a dictionary to understand a word which you don’t know the meaning of. The satisfaction and authenticity or writing by yourself is irreplaceable. Therefore, it is still important to learn to be a good writer.

— Aditya, Hinsdale

You cannot depend on technology to do everything for you. An important factor of writing is expressing yourself and showing creativity. While AI can create a grammatically correct essay, it cannot express how you feel on the subject. Creativity attracts an audience, not being grammatically correct. Learning to write well-written essays without the assistance of AI is a skill that everyone should have.

— Aidan, Ellisville

A few commenters raised ethical concerns around using generators like ChatGPT.

I feel that even with AI, learning how to be a good writer still matters. For example, if you’re writing a college essay or an essay for a class using an AI generated thing, that is plagiarism, which can get you in a lot of trouble because it is against the law to take something that is not yours and try to make it seem like it is your writing. So I believe that learning how to be a good writer still matters a lot because if you want to get into a good college or get good grades, you need to know how to write at least semi-well and make sure the writing is in your own words, not words already generated for you.

— jeo, new york

There are obvious benefits, and I myself have used this software to better understand Calculus problems in a step by step format, or to answer my questions regarding a piece of literature, or time in history. That being said, ethics should be considered, and credit should be given where credit is due; as sources are cited in a traditional paper, so should the use of ChatGPT.

— Ariel, Miami Country Day School

Writing is still an important skill, but maybe not in the same way it has in the past. In an era of improving AI, topics such as grammar and spelling are less important than ever. Google already corrects small grammar mistakes; how long till they can suggest completely restructuring sentences? However, being a good writer is more than just grammar and vocabulary. It’s about collecting your thoughts into a cohesive and thoughtful presentation … If you want to communicate your own ideas, not just a conglomerate of ones on the internet, you’re better off just writing it yourself. That’s not to mention the plethora of issues like AI just making stuff up from time to time. So for now at least, improving your writing is still the best way to share your thoughts.

— Liam, Glenbard West High School

Several students shared how they use A.I. as a resource to aid, rather than replace, their own effort.

I think AI should be a tool for writers. It can help make outlines for writing pieces and it could help solve problems students are stuck on and give them an explanation. However, I think the line should be drawn if students use AI to do the whole entire assignment for them. That’s when it should be considered cheating and not be used.

— Sam, Hinsdale, IL

Sometimes I use A.I. programs such as ChatGPT to help with typing and communication. The results vary, but overall I find it helpful in generating creative ideas, cleaning up language, and speeding up the writing. However, I believe it is important to be careful and filter the results to ensure accuracy and precision. AI tools are valuable aids, but human input and insight are still needed to achieve the desired quality of written communication.

— Zach, New Rochelle High School

As of now, A.I. is not capable of replacing human prose effectively. Just look at the data, the only A.P. tests that ChatGPT did not pass were the ones for English Language and English Literature. This data lays bare a fact that most students refuse to accept: ChatGPT is not able to write a quality essay yet. Now that many schools are loosening restrictions regarding the use of generative A.I., students have two options: either they get back to work or they get a bad grade for their A.I.-generated essay.

On the other hand, there is another alternative that is likely to be the best one yet. A good friend once said, “A.I. software like ChatGPT solves the issue of having a clean sheet of paper”. By nature, humans are terrible at getting anything started. This is the issue that ChatGPT solves. As Bruni asserts, “Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear.” This is true, but ChatGPT can help students by creating a rough draft of what those ideas might look like on paper. The endpoint is this: while students are likely to keep needing to become good writers to excel at school, A.I. technology such as ChatGPT and Grammarly will become additional tools that will help students reach even higher levels of literary excellence.

— Francisco, Miami Country Day School

But some thought we might not be far from a future where A.I. can write for us.

I think that AI will eventually replace the need for the average person to write at the level that they do. AI is no different than every other tech advancement we’ve made, which have made tasks like writing easier. Similar concerns could have been raised with the introduction of computers in the classroom, and the loss of people having great handwriting. I don’t think the prospect should be worrying. AI is a tool. Having it write for us will allow us to focus on more important things that AI is not yet capable of.

— zack, Hinsdale Central

AI is becoming wildly accessible and increasingly more competent. The growth of this sector could mean more students find their way to an AI site to look for an answer. I agree that this could spell trouble for student intelligence if passable answers are so readily available. But you might want to consider the students themselves. The majority are hardworking and smart, not just smart about subjects in school, but about how using only AI for their work could end badly. Students will probably not use the newborn tech first hand until it is basically errorless, and that will take some time.

— Beau, Glen Ellyn, IL

Even so, there were students who doubted that technology could ever replace “what it means to be a writer.”

I don’t think AI will fully be able to replace humans, no matter how much time we as a society take to implement it into everyday life, as they are still just a bunch of numbers and code, and the complexity of a human and the intricacies of our emotions, our thoughts, and feelings, along with what makes each of us an individual, someone that matters, proves that humans will never be able to be fully replicated by AI, and that the most emotion-centric jobs, such as writing, and most fields in art, will forever be, or should forever be, dominated by the experiences and emotional complexity of humans.

— Liam, Hinsdale

AI uses data from the internet it gathers and then puts together a paragraph or two, while it may be able to do this faster than any human, it does not have any authenticity. If it is pulling its information from the web where someone has said something similar, the data found may be biased and the AI would not care. Yet some people still insist it’s the future for writing when in reality, AI will probably not come up with an original idea and only use possibly biased data to give to someone so they can just copy it and move on and undermine what it means to be a writer.

— John, Glenbard North HS

I have never personally used ChatGPT as I believe no robot can recreate the creativity or authenticity humans achieve in writing … Even with growing advances in technology, AI can only create with the information it already knows, which takes away the greatest quality writers have: creativity.

— Stella, Glenbard West

In my opinion, learning to be a good writer absolutely still matters in the age of AI. While artificial intelligence can assist with certain aspects of writing, such as grammar and syntax checking, it cannot replace the creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence that we human writers bring to the table. Another reason is that storytelling, persuasion, and the art of crafting a compelling narrative are skills deeply rooted in human intuition and empathy. A good writer can connect with readers on a personal level, inspiring thoughts, feelings, and actions. AI may enhance efficiency, but it cannot replicate the authentic voice and unique perspective that a human writer brings to their work.

— McKenzie, Warrington, PA

Learn more about Current Events Conversation here and find all of our posts in this column .

2024 Ethics Essay Contest winners announced

Claire Martino , a junior from New Berlin, Wis., majoring in applied mathematics and data science, is the winner of the 2024 Ethics Essay Contest for the essay "Artificial Intelligence Could Probably Write This Essay Better than Me."

The second place entry was from Morgan J. Janes , a junior from Rock Island, Ill., majoring in biology, for the essay "The Relevant History and Medical and Ethical Future Viability of Xenotransplantation."

Third place went to Alyssa Scudder , a senior from Lee, Ill., majoring in biology, for the essay "The Ethicality of Gene Alteration in Human Embryos."

Dr. Dan Lee announced the winners on behalf of the board of directors of the Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics, sponsor of the contest. The winner will receive an award of $100, the second-place winner an award of $50, and the third-place winner an award of $25.

Honorable mentions went to Grace Palmer , a senior art and accounting double major from Galesburg, Ill., for the essay "The Ethiopian Coffee Trade: Is Positive Change Brewing?" and Sarah Marrs , a sophomore from Carpentersville, Ill., majoring in political science and women, gender and sexuality studies, for the essay "Dating Apps as an Outlet to Promote Sexual Autonomy among Disabled Individuals: an Intersectional Approach to Change."

The winning essays will be published in Augustana Digital Commons .

The Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics was established to enrich the teaching-learning experiences for students by providing greater opportunities for them to meet and interact with community leaders and to encourage discussions of issues of ethical significance through campus programs and community outreach.

Dr. Lee, whose teaching responsibilities since joining the Augustana faculty in 1974 have included courses in ethics, serves as the center's director.

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