ChatGPT and college essays

This past admissions cycle, I saw a noticeable increase in ChatGPT use among my students. They never told me that they had used it, but it wasn't hard to spot. It usually sounded something like this:

In addition to gaining empathy, volunteering at the food shelter also allowed me to develop leadership skills. As I became more comfortable in the environment, I started taking on small leadership roles, whether it was helping new volunteers get situated or organizing donation drives. I learned how to manage tasks effectively, ensure that everyone felt included, and keep the atmosphere positive despite the challenges we faced. I also became more comfortable taking initiative, whether that meant offering to stay late to help clean up or suggesting new ways to reach out to community members in need. These experiences taught me that leadership doesn’t always come with a title; it’s about acting with responsibility and making sure others feel supported.

The writing here isn't bad. It's just not particularly helpful because almost anyone who has volunteered at a food shelter could have written this. My colleagues and I joke that you can always spot an AI-generated essay because of ChatGPT's fondness for the word "tapestry." But for me, the real tell-tale sign is a particular hollowness and anonymity of the writing. It is as if any unique voice or identifying details have been scooped out and replaced with very professional sounding mush.

But I don't want to put too much blame on ChatGPT. Because, really, this tool is only exaggerating a tendency I've seen among my students for a long time. Many of their essays sounded a little robotic even before the emergence of generative AI. I'm talking about sentences that sound like this: "At Stanford, I will be thrilled to pursue opportunities that advance my interests and help me make contributions to the community, both in and out of the classroom."

After reading a sentence like this, I am left with lots of questions. What opportunities? What interests? What contributions? What community? Often, the remainder of the essay doesn't fill in these blanks but continues to indiscriminately use buzz words and empty phrases.

Usually, applicants who write these kinds of sentences are just afraid of saying the wrong thing. They are so focused on "sounding good" that they forget that's not really the point of writing. Words are just a means to an end: they help you communicate what you think, what you feel, what you want. But if you aren't doing the work to reflect on what you think, what you feel, what you want, and you're just saying a bunch of stuff that "sounds good" then your essays will just feel... empty. Which brings me to the problem of how students are using ChatGPT.

This past fall, I worked with a student who relied a lot on ChatGPT. During our first meeting, he showed me a draft of his personal statement, which was about how participating in debate helped him become a more confident communicator. This is a very common topic I see, but it is possible to make it feel more unique if it's filled with details and anecdotes that are specific to the writer. The problem was that this student had clearly used ChatGPT to generate the essay, and it had produced something so generic that it felt as though it could literally be written by anybody who had ever participated in debate. It was full of sentences like: "I harnessed my growing skills in communication to advance my personal endeavors."

When I began talking more to this student about his experience with debate, he told me all kinds of interesting stories and details. He told me how, surprisingly, his school cafeteria is one of his favorite places in the world because he feels like he can start a conversation with anyone there. He told me about the app that he was building with a friend to connect cricket players in their town. It was clear that this student had a lot of cool stuff to say, but none of it was in his essay.

Over the course of the next couple of months, this student and I worked together to bring more of these details not only into his personal statement but also his supplementals. But the problem was that he would continue to show up with drafts that had clearly been written by ChatGPT. No matter how many times I tried to explain why these anonymous-sounding, buzzword-heavy essays were not good, he didn't quite believe me.

This, I think, is the problem with students who use ChatGPT but don't have a strong foundation of writing skills. They are easily impressed by ChatGPT's ability to write sentences for them that have multiple clauses and big vocabulary words like "tapestry." But they can't recognize when ChatGPT has given them something that definitely doesn't sound like it was written by a high schooler, and maybe doesn't sound like it was written by a human either.

These students are also often working from false assumptions about what admissions officers want to see in essays. They make the mistake that many applicants do in believing that style is more important than content, and that it is safer to "sound good" than to take risks and say what they actually think. But as Michelle Hernandez, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, wrote, “Admissions officers would rather read a slightly rougher essay that had real feeling in it than a dry but perfectly crafted one.”

And as I've written about before, admissions officers mostly speed read essays for content. And increasingly, they don't assume that the essay they are reading was actually written by the applicant.

Despite all of this, I believe it is very possible to use ChatGPT effectively. This fall, I also saw some students who were using it in a savvier way. One student of mine would write sloppy, brain dump drafts and then ask ChatGPT to clean them up. I think that is generally the right move, but unfortunately ChatGPT has the tendency to overdo it and polish sentences so thoroughly that they are stripped of any of the original details or of the author's distinct voice. This student's "sloppy" first drafts were actually better than ChatGPT's version.

What we certainly know is that ChatGPT isn't going away. As we speak, admissions officers are grappling with how to handle ChatGPT. I was on a call last week with an admissions officer who said he had even seen essays that didn't bother to remove ChatGPT's disclaimer. And I found it very interesting that the University of Michigan asked students to provide an AI-generated essay for their honors application. I actually loved this approach because it then asked the students to reflect (in their own words) on whether or not the AI-generated essay represented their own thoughts.

I truly believe that tools like Chat GPT have the potential to revolutionize how we teach writing. Though of course, as with anything that has potential, it doesn't have to go this way. I can also see ChatGPT leading to the further desecration of writing in our education system, and leading to breakdowns in the quality of information and our ability to communicate with one another, just as social media and the demonetization of journalism have done. It could really go other way.

But I can at least try to push our trajectory in the direction I would like to see. In other words, I am harnessing my growing skills in communication to advance my personal endeavors. 😏