Three Problems Using AI on College Apps

Why ChatGPT Can’t Write Your Essays—or even help with it

AI is not useful for college essays (or college applications in general) and is not likely to be for the foreseeable future.

I’m a college counselor and nationally published writer who’s been assisting seniors with their college essays for a decade, helping them gain admission to highly selective colleges from Berkeley to Northwestern to Yale. After testing ChatGPT’s capabilities, I’m certain that AI assistance can’t help you get accepted, but it can certainly get you rejected.

There are three big problems:

AI cannot write a coherent short-answer supplemental prompt, much less a personal statement.
It cannot compose essays that are consistent in content and style to provide the coherent application that universities want.
Worst of all, AI always uses clichés and employs patterns that give away its usage, greatly increasing the chances of automatic rejection while providing very limited upside.

College AI-related articles

In early September the New York Times, late to every tech trend, published a rash of college AI-related articles: “Applying to College? Here’s How A.I. Tools Might Hurt, or Help, “We Used A.I. To Write Essays for Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” and “Ban or Embrace? Colleges Wrestle With A.I.-Generated Admissions Essays.” The NYT is reliably wrong about tech almost every time, and these pieces, which express cautious optimism about AI, are no exception.

Most obviously, the second article doesn’t showcase the most important college-essay types shared amongst selective universities, instead focusing exclusively on >100-word ultra-short responses. These are only requested by a tiny handful of top-tier universities, like Yale and Stanford, along with a few second-tier schools like USC; every other selective college, from UCLA to Michigan to Harvard, requests longer short-form essays of some 250+ words.

The reason the NYT article doesn’t mention these longer essays is that ChatGPT cannot write them. The Times doesn’t provide an example of this, but I will.

Here’s my ChatGPT input for a USC 250-worder:

Please write a 250-word essay on the following prompt: “The student body at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering is a diverse group of unique engineers and computer scientists who work together to engineer a better world for all humanity. Describe how your contributions to the USC Viterbi student body may be distinct from others. Please feel free to touch on any part of your background, traits, skills, experiences, challenges, and/or personality in helping us better understand you.”

Make it about cooking Indian food while growing up with an Indian family in Seattle, reverse-engineering dishes through going to restaurants, cooking for friends, and emphasizing how unique it is that you’re a computer-science student who can cook.

And here’s ChatGPT’s output:

Title: A Fusion of Flavors: My Unique Contribution to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering

As a computer science student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, I bring a distinctive perspective to our diverse and talented student body—one that combines my passion for technology with my love for cooking Indian cuisine. Growing up in Seattle within an Indian family, I was immersed in a world of aromatic spices, intricate recipes, and the vibrant art of Indian cooking. This culinary journey has not only shaped my identity but has also provided me with a unique set of skills and experiences that set me apart from my peers.

In my quest to master the art of Indian cooking, I embarked on a journey that involved reverse-engineering dishes from various Indian restaurants. This process allowed me to deconstruct complex flavors, understand cooking techniques, and experiment with my own twists. Much like coding, it involved breaking down a problem into smaller components and solving them systematically—a skill that has proved invaluable in both the kitchen and the world of computer science.

What sets me apart is not just my ability to cook, but my desire to share this passion with others. I’ve often found myself hosting gatherings and cooking feasts for my friends, introducing them to the rich tapestry of Indian cuisine. Through these experiences, I’ve honed my communication, teamwork, and leadership skills—qualities that are crucial for success in engineering and computer science.

My unique contribution to the USC Viterbi student body is the fusion of my culinary expertise with my passion for technology. As a computer science student who can whip up a delicious Indian meal, I am a testament to the diverse talents that exist within our community. I believe that my ability to blend flavors in the kitchen mirrors my ability to innovate and create in the world of technology. Together, these passions enable me to engineer a better world for all humanity, one byte and one bite at a time.

This essay is awful! First of all, it’s not 250 words, it’s 334; you’d think this’d be a simple instruction to follow, but I guess not. At least there’s plenty of stuff to cut, starting with the title (which college essays don’t have).

Really, you could cut almost everything. The essay is consistently pretentious and overwritten, using a dozen words when five would suffice. It lacks any distinct personality or specificity and employs clichéd language to cover up its emptiness. More on this later.

Contrast this with 250 words of a human-written and human-edited essay:

Learning to cook made humanity much smarter. For me, it’s been no less momentous.

In sixth grade I began binging cooking videos, trying to reverse-engineer every restaurant dish by deconstructing them, carefully tasting the components, and matching them to menu descriptions. My parents pushed back against my desire to play with fire, so I started by getting permission to make “Tanay’s specialty peanuts.” Eventually I was allowed to bake brownies, then cook a chicken concoction. Ever since I’ve been cooking more ambitious dishes, despite my dad’s laments of “yeh bawarchi banega” (“He’ll become a chef!”).

Cooking has introduced me to my own culture. I began with dal, an Indian classic with regional variations; our normal fare reflects my dad’s Telugu palette, but my mom’s slightly sweetened dal is characteristically Marathi. It’s also been a portal into other cultures. Last year I whipped up a conventional Thanksgiving feast for my family, adding literal and metaphorical spice to classic Americana. And on a recent trip to rural Eastern Washington I put together a Lebanese smorgasbord, heading into the kitchen and not emerging until five courses were ready.

My dad is wrong. I won’t become a chef. I’ll be a programmer who cooks—enjoying a balanced diet in an unhealthy college and work culture of fast food and meal plans. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” My friends, family, collaborators and colleagues will always dine well.

From line one this essay oozes personality. We get to know the applicant, his family, and his milieu in vivid and specific terms. He employs irony and shows off his literacy. The essay has an abundance of perspective and humor, two things colleges value very highly.

They also value consistency. If essays and activities lists employ divergent tones and styles, it’s a major red flag that the essay wasn’t written by the student, or too much outside assistance was used.

Using ChatGPT to assist with essays will invariably raise this red flag. Its various AI personas don’t add up to a consistent personality. This is a disaster. Think of your admissions essays as stories whose plot is your life and whose conclusion is admission to a fancy university. AI doesn’t get this, so though its anecdotes could work OK as stand-alone stories, their whole will be much less than the sum of their parts, leaving colleges with a muddled picture of the applicant and few reasons to admit them.

Let’s see how ChatGPT answers the USC micro-essays; below is my parameter and ChatGPT’s answers:

Please write short responses to the following questions as if you were an Indian computer-science applicant that liked to cook, limiting the answer to #1 to 25 characters and the answers to #2-#6 to 100 characters:

Describe yourself in three words. Tech Enthusiast, Chef
What is your favorite snack? Samosas and chai
Best movie of all time? “Inception”
Dream job? Tech entrepreneur
If your life had a theme song, what would it be? “Adventure Awaits”
Dream trip? Culinary tour of India

Ideally these responses showcase an applicant’s range while also cohering with his other responses, and by that standard something seems a little off about these. #1 probably wants three distinct adjectives or characteristics, rather than spending two words on “Tech Enthusiast,” a cringey phrase. The remaining prompts allow for 100 characters, suggesting elaboration, but ChatGPT instead offers the bland equivalent of teenage monosyllabism. Think about how many of USC’s 80,000 applicants are going to write “Dream job?” “Tech entrepreneur”—it’s the short-response-essay version of “How are you?” “Fine.” There’s nothing that makes the applicant stand out; instead, his personality seems mechanical and robotic, and no college wants that.

Unfortunately, that’s all ChatGPT can provide. Line by line and word by word, AI inputs the internet and outputs clichés and platitudes. Look back at its USC essay, which uses the phrase “distinctive perspective to our diverse and talented student body.” This is the kind of meaningless gobbledygook you’d write if you had nothing to say. Showing you have a “distinctive perspective” is how you win the admissions game; simply declaring you do is totally unconvincing. And everyone knows you think USC has a “diverse and talented student body”—why else would you be applying there, and what does it have to do with you?

From ChatGPT’s opening we learn nothing about the applicant, and therefore have no reason to accept him. The rest of the essay is even worse. This culinary journey has not only shaped my identity but has also provided me with a unique set of skills and experiences that set me apart from my peers—pure fluff; get to the point. What sets me apart is not just my ability to cook, but my desire to share this passion with others—the kind of thing you’d say if you have nothing to say. Together, these passions enable me to engineer a better world for all humanity, one byte and one bite at a time—and we end with a poorly executed groaner: imagine saying that on a date, or answering a job-interview question that way, without embarrassment.

ChatGPT’s writing is so devoid of content or substance that editing it or iterating the prompt are both futile. You could consider keeping the structure, which is “good” in the same way as a perfunctory five-paragraph essay, but on the whole the NYT’s idea that ChatGPT could “democratize” access to essay-editing services is absurd; no input will yield passable writing. The only thing to do is to throw it in the garbage … because if you don’t, the admissions officers certainly will.

ChatGPT’s essay not only lacks merit, it also endangers your entire application. Admissions committees hate it when they perceive applicants have blown off the essays, and, if they’re suspicious you used AI, your chances are even worse. It’s true that rigorously determining AI usage through algorithms is very hard, and professorial paranoia has led to frequent false positives and flunkings that were later retracted. But it’s also true that determining probable AI use through close reading is easy; check out this exercise from the very same New York Times and see if you can’t get at least eight out of 10.

This lower threshold of proof is what admissions officers use; in an increasingly competitive environment, they’re always looking for reasons to cull the applicant pool, and they can and will reject applicants based on gut feeling. Though the admissions process is arbitrary and opaque, and years and years of working closely with college-bound seniors has taught me that we never know exactly what’s going to happen, it’s very likely ChatGPT-based essays will, for the next several years at least, doom more applicants than they help.

Learn to write essays with Chris Morris-Lent

Instead, you can learn to write essays that, using my process distilled from a decade of experience, showcase your finest characteristics and make admissions committees want to let you in. Check out a list of my students’ finest essays here, and learn more at seattlesbesttutor.com .