I’m finishing up my Common App pretty late because I really disliked my original draft and was too anxious to work on it. Today, I finished up another rough draft that I felt much better about (but it was still pretty rough, of course) even though I’d been working on it for only a couple of days. Against my better judgement though, I put it through some AI Essay Graders, and some were giving me a pretty okay score (70-80%) but others were absolutely brutal, in which I only got around 20%.
I know I’m not good at narrative writing, but honestly the scoring has me really nervous and pretty discouraged. Sometimes when I tweaked the draft to be more clear or specific it lowered my score even further, and I know this is a dumb question, but does anyone know exactly how much merit I should give these graders?
Ignore them. They’re worthless. Ask a human with a real brain (teacher, parent, friend who’s a good writer) to look at your work instead.
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I’ll start by assuming you didn’t use AI to help write your essay.
I agree you should ignore the AI essay graders, don’t waste more time doing that or giving the results another thought.
If you do have someone take a look at your essay, make sure it is someone who knows about essay writing specific to college apps, as they are not like a typical five paragraph English class essay. You can use Google Docs/Word for grammar and spelling edits, you don’t need someone else for that.
You can have someone at CC review your essay by following this process: STUDENTS, Need Help w/ Your College Essays? Get Community Feedback Now
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It is a truism of AI that it can’t be any better than the information it has to work with. And to my knowledge, no public AI really has access to the sort of information it would need for this purpose, such as a large and representative database of essays with internal grades from the colleges to which you are planning to apply.
I wouldn’t put much credence in any numerical score the AI gives you. But can they be helpful in reviewing and pointing out things you might have missed? Sure.
I actually would be surprised many people on here have tried a large number (or really any?) the products that market themselves as essay graders here.
I also doubt those products are more than a simple “GPT wrappers” with a pretty simple prompts etc, though I could be wrong. I personally haven’t tried.
Maybe someone has done some real research and training, but I doubt it given UNC just dropped Slate’s (the system most college use for app processing) internal AI essay grader, saying it wasn’t helpful. I suspect they are all pretty garbage.
I would use the advice from college essay guy, william & mary, etc, top school podcasts (yale, dartmouth) etc and have someone else read it, and make sure gramatically correct etc.
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