AI Is Good, But Not That Good

Ivy Link’s founder, Adam Nguyen, recently sat down with Business Insider to discuss the use of ChatGPT for college admissions essays. Prior to the interview, Beatrice Nolan, Junior Reporter for the publication, asked ChatGPT to write an admissions essay. Initially, the AI refused to write the essay stating that the essay should be based on personal experience which the AI was obviously incapable of recreating. However, after changing the prompt to write an essay based on more general parameters, the AI complied and wrote three separate essays.

Upon reviewing the three essays, two experts, including our founder, agreed that a human reader likely wouldn’t detect that the essays had been written by an AI. They were passable essays. If they were to be assigned a grade, both experts would assign it a B or lower. And both agreed that the essays written by the AI would not get a student into any of the top 50 colleges.

College admissions officers are looking for genuine emotion and introspection. None of the essays written by the AI contained these characteristics. Instead, the essays were full of cliches and superficial babble. They lacked originality and insight which top colleges expect from the students they admit. And worse, the essays were predictable. Admissions officers love a well-written surprise in an essay. They don’t want to know how an essay is going to end when they start reading it. 

The takeaway from this is that while the AI writes passable essays and seems like a convenient tool to use, it is nowhere near good enough to get you into a top college. When you sit down to write your personal statement, you want to make sure to give honest emotion, intellectual introspection, and you want to surprise your reader. The AI might be good, but they aren’t capable of this because they aren’t human. They don’t have human experience on their side. And they never will. Use your personal experience to craft the best essay you can. That’s how to impress an admissions officer.

If you need help crafting your personal statement, or you would like some tutoring to help you improve your writing, reach out to Ivy Link below! Our essay specialists have decades of combined experience in helping students gain admission to their top-choice colleges, and many were former application readers themselves.