Staring at a blank Word document? Can’t even find a single word to start your essay? Writing college essays is often the most time consuming and difficult part of the college application process. If you’re like most high school seniors, this could be the first time since second or third grade that you’re being asked to write a personal essay about yourself. And now with ChatGPT, it can be tempting to ask AI to write all of your college essays.
While AI writing tools like ChatGPT feel like quick and simple solutions, using them can mean the quick end of your college journey. The Common App’s fraud policy explicitly identifies the “substantive output of an artificial intelligence algorithm” as plagiarism. Similarly, UC Berkeley says that while students can use generative AI for “advice on content and editing”, “content and final written text” must be their own”.
The upshot – AI should only be used to augment your own ideas and writing. Anything more is academic dishonesty and could send your application straight to the rejection pile.
There are responsible ways and irresponsible ways to use AI. Here are 5 ways students can responsibly use AI to supercharge their college applications.
How do ChatGPT, Bard, and other AI platforms work?
ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) developed by OpenAI. Many other companies have released their own LLMs. Google released Bard, X released Grok, Microsoft released CoPilot, and Meta released Llama.
Other AI platforms are built as wrappers around these base LLMs. For instance, Harvi is an AI college counselor that is built on top of Open AI. While Harvi and ChatGPT use the same base LLM, Harvi is trained with college counseling best practices and college-specific data.
Ultimately, while LLMs are trained on slightly different texts and have different advantages and disadvantages, they all work in the same fundamental way. After being trained on massive amounts of data, LLMs allow users to ask it a question, make it do an action, or otherwise “prompt” it. Then, LLMs will repeatedly return a prediction of the most likely next word, based on the data set it was trained on.
For instance, I could prompt an LLM by asking it “write my college essay”, and the LLM would respond with a college essay.
Think this doesn’t happen? Unfortunately, these LLMs are not as responsible as human college counselors.
ChatGPT can easily be used to cheat.
As you can see in this picture, ChatGPT can easily be induced into writing an entire college essay.
I prompted ChatGPT “I'm having trouble writing my college essay. Can you show me an example?”. Then, ChatGPT replied with an entire 650 word essay that I could copy and paste into my Common Application.
This is not good. Essays that are generated by ChatGPT in their entirety are absolutely plagiarism.
But that’s not all. The essay ChatGPT returned was for a student who lived near the Pacific Ocean and was interested in environmental science. Chances are - that isn’t you.
The best college essay describes who you are as a person and how your past academic, extracurricular, personal, and cultural experiences make you a compelling candidate who will do great things in and after university. Ultimately, the best college essay is authentic.
Because ChatGPT doesn’t know anything about you, it will write a college essay that could hypothetically be good for someone, but not for you.
ChatGPT could be a brainstorming tool.
I tried asking ChatGPT to write me a college essay, and this time, it was a bit more helpful. Instead of returning a random essay, it asked me to share more about my own interests, experiences, achievements, or goals.
This is a bit better. ChatGPT is trying to learn a bit more about me. After all, college essays should be as personal as possible.
I only responded that “I like math”. Instead of generating an essay, ChatGPT returns an outline that can help jumpstart my writing process.
This is already so much better than the previous example. I can take the outline and start filling in the bullet points with more details.
However, because ChatGPT is trained on all the text on the Internet, its recommendations aren’t tailored to the college essay writing experience.
I would never suggest a student write about a math class or even a math competition. Even if you are interested in math, this topic likely won’t allow you to describe deeply personal or culturally relevant experiences.
Additionally, there may be parts of the outline that I need help brainstorming further. After all, all I’ve written so far is “I love math”. How can I twist that into the seven paragraphs and 15 bullet points that ChatGPT has supplied?
Harvi is a responsible AI that helps students with their college essays.
After talking to 100+ college admissions leaders, researching the best practices on AI in college applications, and playing with existing AI tools like ChatGPT, our team set out to build the best AI solution for the college admissions process.
As we build Harvi, we follow three key principles:
Never generate content.
Always ask questions, so the student is in the driver’s seat.
Keep advice short and sweet (unlike the paragraph-long outputs that ChatGPT was generating).
Harvi will never generate an essay, a paragraph, a sentence, or even a word for students. Harvi will only ask questions to help a student brainstorm, outline, and edit their college essays.
If I’ve convinced you that ChatGPT is not a good option for college essays and you’re looking for a purpose-built tool, try out Harvi. It’s totally free, and if you have any problems or suggestions, please shoot me a note at michael.gao@harvi.io.
