Students applying to college know they can’t — or at least shouldn’t — use AI chatbots to write their essays and personal statements. So it might come as a surprise that some schools are now using artificial intelligence to read them.
This fall, Virginia Tech is debuting an AI-powered essay reader. The college expects it will be able to inform students of admissions decisions a month sooner than usual, in late January, because of the tool’s help sorting tens of thousands of applications.
The California Institute of Technology is launching an AI tool this fall to look for “authenticity” in students who submit research projects with their applications, admissions director Ashley Pallie said. Students upload their research to an AI chatbot that interviews them about it on video, which is then reviewed by Caltech faculty.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faced a barrage of negative feedback from applicants, parents and students after its student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, reported in January the school was using AI to evaluate the grammar and writing style of applicants’ essays.
Georgia Tech this fall is rolling out an AI tool to review the college transcripts of transfer students, replacing the need for staff to enter each course manually into a database. It will allow the school to inform applicants more quickly how many transfer credits they’ll receive, cutting down on uncertainty and wait times, said Richard Clark, the school’s executive director of enrollment management.
Stony Brook University in New York is also using artificial intelligence to review applicants’ transcripts and testing AI tools for a variety of tasks, like summarizing student essays and letters of recommendation to highlight things an admissions officer should consider, said Richard Beatty, the school’s senior associate provost for enrollment management.
I sometimes use chat gpt to get a sense whether a college essay answers the question and is written reasonably. For that, AI adds some value, and would be helpful to admissions. So, if admissions wants to weed out the bottom 10% using AI, that might work. That is still not without some danger. AI won’t fully appreciated the less structured, creatively written, more subtle submissions. That is too bad because sometimes those are the best of all. I also fear admissions might start with 10% and, in time, be at 50%. The slippery slope is very real imo.
Overall, AI seems be able to easily weed out the flawed, but is less proficient at judging greatness.
The most interesting element of this to me is that if AI is grading essays, then as a student I’d be hard pressed to not believe that AI should just write the essay too. Maybe this will be the death of the college essay, and admissions will just go to short answer, straightforward responses to admissions questions. The value of the beautifully written essay should drop, no?
Can you provide more explanation of why that would be your conclusion as a student? Grading and writing seem two very different tasks, and that would not be my conclusion as a student.
Mostly because it seems like a ramping up of an escalating war. If the essay needs to meet an algorithmically determined definition of “good”, then why not employ an algorithm to create that “good”? Why would we, as humans, choose to fight the AI? We would adapt to it and seek to create things that are pleasing to the AI.
It sort of reminds of me of how genAI engines today are quite sycophantic. They seek to please us. I would want to write to please the AI grading engine. I bet an AI engine could write to please pretty efficiently.
I guess it all comes down to whether we think that the genuine idea of writing a Common App essay is to both elucidate us but also to create a compelling story that interests and surprises readers. Now the goal will be to do the same for an algorithmically determined outcome. That, to me, might compel a writer to just solve for the problem versus writing something that they truly believe or think.
I could, of course, be very mistaken in this assertion.
Thanks for the reply. I guess I would see it differently, and assume that if they wanted AI written answers, there would be no point in asking for essays since they are not admitting AI. But I appreciate the response.
I just used AI to do a transcription and summary of a recorded interview. The first time I have used it. I did it for an assignment and my old phone won’t do transcription, so I asked Chat GPT how to do it in another way and it guided me to VOMO.
I read essays here on CC and find some of them appealingly abstract or stream of consciousness , some use interesting metaphorical devices and so on. I share the fear that AI screening of essays will miss the most interesting ones.
I agree. I’m a technologist who works with LLMs and this is an important point. GenAI doesn’t “understand” things the way humans do.
It’s trained to predict the next word in a sentence based on patterns in huge amounts of text. Through that process it can seem nuanced or knowledgeable, but it isn’t aware of what it’s saying - it’s using statistical patterns, not human-style understanding or lived experience. So subtle points can easily be missed.
I see it as hypocritical if a school specifically doesn’t allow any AI use when writing essays, and then uses AI to grade/rate/evaluate essays.
The only thing I will add, without sharing too much detail, is that at the school where I work the enrollment management leaders say AI is ‘not even close’ to being able to holistically read apps the way humans do (and how the school currently wants apps read.) I assume we are developing/testing our own in house AI tool for this function, but don’t know for sure.
With that said, I expect AI will get there, it’s just a matter of when.
More to support what most everyone here is saying -
Using AI to judge a college essays becomes addicting. At first, you find it interesting, but do not really believe it. Eventually, it is hard to completely ignore the feedback. When I use it for this purpose, I try very hard not to take AI feedback and scoring literally, but it is not easy. AI can be more confident than you.