Getting In - Part 5

Professor Emeritus Dan Hare of UC-Riverside sent me a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article on the use of AI in college admissions essays:

...My students had already been using ChatGPT for months for their homework and personal advice. When application season began, the bot remembered these details. It knew their preferences and interests through the Memory feature and could tailor their essays accordingly. That wasn’t enough, though. Students first brainstormed essay topics and writing outlines without AI assistance. They then gave that information to ChatGPT along with past self-written essays. It began mirroring their voice. 

In a 2025 study, Cornell University researchers concluded that large-language model-generated college essays were generic compared to human-written ones, but they didn’t use elaborate prompting or engage with the models beforehand. That’s not the way people are using ChatGPT now. The college essay isn’t a novel or a blank canvas. It’s less ambiguous. It serves a purpose: to show who you are outside of grades and test scores. With a defined purpose, training and prompting, models can now write compelling essays for students to pick from and refine. 

Throughout the application cycle, I worried that my students would get caught using these tools. When submitting applications on the Common App, students sign a statement certifying that all the work is their own. But a policy is only as strong as its enforcement, which so far seems nearly impossible. The Common App and most universities likely don’t use AI detection tools because they’re unreliable. Despite warnings that admissions officers are trained to spot AI indicators, recent studies show that most people mistake AI-generated text for human writing. In fact, one study fine-tuned ChatGPT on award-winning authors’ works and found that readers favored AI-generated text over human writing for stylistic fidelity and quality. This suggests that students may actually gain an advantage by using these tools on their college essays...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/ai-college-admission-essay-application-22156396.php.

Bottom line: AI written essays are now not being written "cold." Instead, the models learn the style of the purported student author and "improve" it. So trying to detect them is very difficult, if not impossible.

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Meanwhile, there seems to be an endless supply of former admissions officer who will tell you how to get in. (There are so many former admissions officers. Are there any left who are still employed to staff the admissions offices?)