Why AI Won’t Impact the College Essay Anytime Soon

It seems like a cheap and easy solution to the dreaded college essay. Just punch a few questions into ChatGPT and watch it generate a response that will get you into college. There might be a few glitches in the system now, but in a few years (so the argument goes), you won’t have to worry about writing your college application essay anymore. So is AI the future of essay writing?

We’re sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but we don’t see it happening. Why? Well, let’s start with something our tutors have noticed:

When you read college admissions essays all day every day, you know when they were written by ChatGPT.

It’s not a common scenario, but it happens. A student presents us with an essay that they pass off as their own, and after reading it, we give the student our assessment.

“It reads like it was written by ChatGPT.”

Inevitably, they give us a guilty look and apologize. It’s not a situation you want to be in with us, let alone with a college admissions officer. But to understand why these essays are so easily identifiable, we need to turn to what AI does well…

AI can write generic, functional text.

If you want ChatGPT to write a basic contract, you’re in luck. If you want it to summarize some key points in a historical document, great. And yes, ChatGPT can produce a 650-word common app essay that you could theoretically submit to colleges. It might contain a few glitches and inconsistencies here and there, but after cleaning those up, it’s possible you’ll end up with an essay that sounds like it was written by a real human being.

But you’ll also end up with a college essay that makes you sound like other people. ChatGPT scours the internet for massive amounts of text and puts together stories by jumping to the lowest common denominator. As a result, it generates experiences that seem like they could have happened to anyone. And that gives rise to a big problem:

The whole point of the college essay is to distinguish yourself from other people.

Colleges find out how you rank intellectually by looking at your SAT and GPA, and they get a sense of how hardworking and motivated you are by looking at your extracurriculars list. The college essay is your only opportunity to put an individual stamp on your application – and if you submit something cliched and generic, that will be the equivalent of getting a 2.0 GPA or a mediocre SAT.

There’s only one way to write a great college application essay, and that’s to do it yourself. Unlike ChatGPT, which draws on what other people have written, you can draw on your actual lived experience. And because your experience is messy and contradictory (like that of any other human being), you can put together a surprising story that could only have been written by you.

Is it easy? No. Is there a formula you can follow? Sadly not. But if you start reflecting about what makes you unique, we guarantee you’ll come up with something compelling – and you’ll quickly understand why there’s no point using ChatGPT for college essays.