College Smart Families,

Welcome to our second installment of all things college applications! Our goal is to provide pertinent information to answer questions and help all our clients feel fully informed throughout this once-in-a-lifetime college application experience.

Today’s topic is on generative AI and the use for assistance with college admissions. As you know, Chat GPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) were thrust upon the world in the middle of the college application season last year and met with a widespread, but functionally unenforceable ban. Despite nearly a year going by, not much has changed on that front. Georgia Tech was one of a very limited number of schools to put out a formal policy (GA Tech – AI Policy), which permits the usage for brainstorming, editing, and refining ideas but requires that the ultimate submission is your own. Most other schools have refrained from making a formal policy. Yale’s Admissions Office has a podcast where they recently tackled the subject (Yale – AI and College Essays) where they do mention the Common App affirmation statement that certifies that all work completed is their own, which would fundamentally conflict with extensive use of generative AI. More to the point though, the podcast hosts mention the limitations of LLMs being the real reason that applicants should avoid using it, “The relationship between having an idea and expressing it in a nuanced, slightly narrower way, is still something that a sophisticated language model can’t quite get.” Another risk is that if you prompt generative AI to write your entire essay from scratch, you’ll likely sound uncannily similar to dozens of other essays that they’ve read that year.

In the College Smart Advising model, we preach that there are three things that Admissions Offices are trying to assess when looking at the essays that are submitted.

1. Can you write?
2. Can you tell a story?
3. Why should I care about you over the hundreds of others?

Generative AI does a good job at the first one but struggles at the other two. So, when using AI, please limit your use to recommending alternative phrasings, asking it to look for active vs. passive tense, or other similar use cases. A great example of a smart usage of ChatGPT is to help you condense an activity for your Common App Activity List into 150 characters. Obviously, you’ll still have to edit, refine, and tweak the verbiage slightly, but you can trust that it will have good grammar and the right character count! 

Lots of fascinating news. If you’d like to schedule some time to chat with the team, please reach out to us.

Thanks,

Ed McCarthy