Students try using AI to write scholarship essays — with little luck
Will Geiger estimates that he read about 10,000 college application essays over the course of a years-long career in college admissions and scholarships before ChatGPT came on the scene in 2022. Shortly afterwards, Geiger began to notice that essays felt less and less like they had been written by 17- or 18-year-olds. He saw more […] The post Students try using AI to write scholarship essays — with little luck appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Will Geiger estimates that he read about 10,000 college application essays over the course of a years-long career in college admissions and scholarships before ChatGPT came on the scene in 2022.
Shortly afterwards, Geiger began to notice that essays felt less and less like they had been written by 17- or 18-year-olds. He saw more hyperorganized five-paragraph essays; more essays that were formatted as a letter to someone; and certain examples and words being used over and over again by different students.
Geiger began to see less humanity shining through and more instances of words — like “cornerstone” and “bedrock” — that are not commonly used by typical teenagers.
“They felt a little bit sterile,” said Geiger, the cofounder and CEO of a company called Scholarships360, an online platform used by more than 300,000 students last year to find and apply for scholarships.
Curious, Scholarships360 staffers deployed AI-detection software called GPTZero. It checked almost 1,000 essays submitted for one scholarship and determined that about 42 percent of them had likely been composed with the help of generative AI.
With college acceptances beginning to roll in for high school seniors, and juniors starting to brainstorm the essays they’ll submit with their applications in the fall, Geiger is concerned. When students use AI to help write their essays, he said, they are wasting a valuable opportunity.
“The essay is one of the few opportunities in the admissions process for a student to communicate directly with a scholarship committee or with an admissions reader,” Geiger said. “That provides a really powerful opportunity to share who you are as a person, and I don’t think that an AI tool is able to do that.”
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Madelyn Ronk, a 20-year-old student at Penn State Beaver, said she never considered using ChatGPT to write the personal statement required for her transfer application from community college last year. A self-described Goody Two-shoes, she didn’t want to get in trouble. But there was another reason: She didn’t want to turn in the same essay as anyone else.
“I want to be unique. I feel like when people use AI constantly, it just gives the same answer to every single person,” said Ronk, who wrote her essay about volunteering for charitable organizations in her hometown. “I would like my answer to be me. So I don’t use AI.”
Geiger said students’ fears about submitting a generic essay are valid — they’re less likely to get scholarships that way. But that doesn’t mean they have to avoid generative AI altogether. Some companies offer services to help students use AI to improve their work, rather than to cheat — such as getting help writing an outline, using proper grammar or making points effectively. Generative AI can proofread an essay, and can even tell a student whether their teacher is likely to flag it as AI-assisted.
PackBack, for example, is an online platform whose software can chat with students and give feedback as they are writing. The bot might flag grammatical errors or the use of passive voice or whether students are digressing from their point. Craig Booth, the company’s chief technology officer, said the software is designed to introduce students to ethical uses of AI.
A 2024 survey of college applicants found that about 50 percent had used AI for brainstorming essays, 47 percent had used it to create an outline, and about 20 percent had used it to generate first drafts.
Not all scholarship providers or colleges have policies on exactly how AI can or cannot be used in prospective student essays. For example, Common App forbids the use of generative AI but doesn’t check individual essays unless someone files a report of suspected fraud. Jackson Sternberg, a spokesperson for Common App, declined to share how many reports of fraud they get each year or how they handle their investigations.
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Tools like GPTZero aren’t reliable 100 percent of the time. The Markup, a news outlet focused on technology, reported on a study that found writing by non-native-English speakers is far more likely to get flagged as being AI-generated than writing by native English speakers. And several other studies have found that the accuracy rates of such tools vary widely.
Because detection software isn’t always accurate, Geiger said, Scholarships360 doesn’t base scholarship decisions on whether essays were flagged as being generated by AI. But, he said, many of the students whose essays were flagged weren’t awarded a given scholarship because “if your writing is being mistaken for AI,” whether you used the technology or not, for a scholarship or admissions essay, “it’s probably going to be missing the mark.”
Jonah O’Hara, who serves as chair of the admissions practices committee at the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, said that using AI isn’t “inherently evil,” but colleges and scholarship providers need to be transparent about their expectations and students need to disclose when they’re using it and for what. Colleges that are using AI in the admissions review process also need to be transparent about that with prospective students, he said.
O’Hara, who is director of college counseling at Rocky Hill Country Day School in Rhode Island, said that he has always discouraged students from using a thesaurus in writing college application essays, or using any words that aren’t normal for them.
“If you don’t use ‘hegemony’ and ‘parsimonious’ in text messages with your friends, then why would you use it in an essay to college? That’s not you,” O’Hara said. “If you love the way polysyllabic words roll off your tongue, then, of course, if it’s your voice, then use it.”
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Generative AI is, functionally, the latest evolution of the thesaurus, and O’Hara wonders whether it has “put a shelf life on the college essay.”
There was a time when some professors offered self-scheduled, unproctored take-home exams, O’Hara recalled. Students had to sign an honor statement promising that everything they submitted was their own work. But the onus was on the professors to write cheat-proof exams. O’Hara said if the college essay is going to survive, he thinks this is the direction administrators will have to go.
“If we get to a point where colleges cannot confidently determine [its] authenticity,” he said, “then they may abandon it entirely.”
Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or osanchez@hechingerreport.org.
This story about generative AI was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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