OpenAI’s latest chatbot is causing a stir in education all over the world, and has forced many teachers, professors, and school administrators to grapple with how to ensure their students abide by academic integrity and demonstrate authenticity in their assignments and applications.
What is ChatGPT?
According to ChatGPT itself, it is an AI-powered chatbot that “uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner.” When you ask it a question or give it a prompt, it looks for patterns and associations in its vast database of language data to generate a response.
In other words, “ChatGPT is a very smart computer that knows a lot of things because it has read many books and websites, and it can help us with our questions or tell us interesting facts.” (This is the “explain it to me like I’m five years old” version.)
A Plague Upon Education?
There are many potential academic benefits of ChatGPT and similar AI technologies. It can help students improve their language skills and generate ideas, explain complex concepts in simple terms, and synthesize information more conveniently than a search engine.
But it also opens the door to new kinds of cheating and plagiarism, or as Professor Jeremy Weissman called it in his recent op-ed, “a plague upon education”. It can write high school or college-level essays so coherently that it can be hard to tell the difference between an essay written by ChatGPT and an essay written by a real student.
School administrators and college professors are understandably concerned about how this could affect students’ learning and academic integrity. What if students simply ask ChatGPT to write their essays instead of putting in the effort and critical thinking required to write them themselves? What if they never learn to develop their own arguments and ideas because they can just ask a bot to do it for them?
Implications for College Applications
The college admissions world is no exception to these concerns. A writer for Forbes recently used ChatGPT to generate two well-written essays (a personal statement and a 500-word supplement) in under 20 minutes.
Admissions officers who were asked to weigh in commented that ChatGPT’s essays were logically-structured, detailed, and grammatically perfect, but sounded cliché and lacked soul. As a former admissions officer myself, I agree. ChatGPT’s essays are technically well-written, but they don’t energize the reader the way a passionate, honest, human-written essay does.
So, Can ChatGPT Write Your College Essays?
Well, technically, yes. ChatGPT can write you a passable, grammatically and structurally perfect essay.
But if there’s one lesson I hope you take away from this, it’s that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
First and foremost, using ChatGPT to write your college essays is just plain unethical. Just as unethical as asking your mom, or your cousin, or your College Advisor to write them. Just as unethical as fabricating activities or awards, or pressuring your teachers to write your recommendations a certain way. If doing any of those things doesn’t sit right with you (and they shouldn’t!), then submitting AI-written essays shouldn’t either.
Secondly, despite some headlines that claim the opposite, you can write a way better essay than ChatGPT can. No computer, no matter how smart or well-read, can recreate your unique voice and style.
Not only that, but ChatGPT also tends to weave in information that sounds plausible but is actually incorrect (like the names of current professors at UW-Madison). The last thing your “Why us?” essay needs is an embarrassing mix-up like that.
So, my advice? If you truly want your college essay to stand out, you need to write it yourself.
Nervous about the essay writing process? We can help. Unlike AI programs, our College Advisors and Essay Coaches offer personalized advice and feedback to help you write your best college essays and make sure your personality and authenticity shine through.