You are not allowed to use AI as you are writing and revising your essays. AI does a poor job of writing admissions essays. The AI leaves out important details because it doesn’t know you. The AI includes buzzwords and fluff that may sound good to an untrained reader but, in actuality, add no value to your
essay. The AI doesn’t write in your voice and instead writes in the voice it developed by pattern matching on example essays online.

AI produces subpar essays that are easily skipped over by admissions officers, but using AI is also a risk. AI-aided writing uses a set of common word patterns and phrases that can easily be detected by people who
read lots of essays. And if admissions officers suspect your essays may be heavily AI-aided, they are likely to pass over your application.

One way to leverage AI is to help you add variety to your vocabulary or check for passive voice. When doing this, use a prompt like, “What are five good synonyms for excellent”, rather than pasting your entire sentence into the prompt generator. You can also use AI during the brainstorming process to flesh out an idea with a couple of bullet points that you can use as a template. In this situation, I’d recommend writing something along the lines of, “Write out five ways that I can connect my experience in Speech and Debate Club to my core values of empathy, knowledge, and community”. This will help you come up with some loose outlines that you should be able to customize and turn into a high-quality, original first draft.

Additionally, we don’t recommend using grammar checkers that do more than just check for grammar errors. Grammarly and similar tools are increasingly making wording suggestions. While some suggestions may be useful, we find many suggestions are poor, incorrect, or remove your voice (and use the same common word patterns of AI-aided writing). At the very least, if you use this type of tool, do not just accept all changes blindly. Go through each suggestion and make a deliberate choice of whether to use it or not.