ChatGPT can be used for many things: school work, cover letters, and apparently, college admissions essays.
College essays, sometimes known as personal statements, are a time-consuming but important part of the application process. They are not required for all institutions, but experts say they can make or break a candidate's chances when they are.
The essays are often based on prompts that require students to write about a personal experience, such as:
Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
I asked ChatGPT to whip up a few based on some old questions from the Common App, a widely used application process across the US. In about 10 minutes I had three entrance essays that were ready to use.
At first, the chatbot refused to write a college application essay for me, telling me it was important I wrote from my personal experience. However, after prompting it to write me a "specific example answer" to an essay question with vivid language to illustrate the points, it generated some pretty good text based on made-up personal experiences.
I sent the results to two admissions professionals to see what they thought.
The essays seemed like they had been written by real students, experts say
Both of the experts I asked said the essays would pass for a real student.
Adam Nguyen, founder of tutoring company Ivy Link, previously worked as an admissions reader and interviewer in Columbia's Office of Undergraduate Admission and as an academic advisor at Harvard University. He told Insider: "Having read thousands of essays over the years, I can confidently say that it would be extremely unlikely to ascertain with the naked eye that these essays were AI-generated."
Kevin Wong, Princeton University alumnus and cofounder of tutoring service PrepMaven, which specializes in college admissions, agreed.
"Without additional tools, I don't think it would be easy to conclude that these essays were AI-generated," he said. "The essays do seem to follow a predictable pattern, but it isn't plainly obvious that they weren't written by a human."
"Plenty of high school writers struggle with basic prose, grammar, and structure, and the AI essays do not seem to have any difficulty with these basic but important areas," he added.
Nguyen also praised the grammar and structure of the essays, and said that they also directly addressed the questions.
"There were some attempts to provide examples and evidence to support the writer's thesis or position. The essays are in the first-person narrative format, which is how these essays should be written," he said.
Wong thought the essays may even have been successful at some colleges. "Assuming these essays weren't flagged as AI-generated, I think they could pass muster at some colleges. I know that students have been admitted to colleges after submitting essays lower in quality than these," he said.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
They weren't good enough for top colleges
Nguyen said I wouldn't be able to apply to any of the top 50 colleges in the US using the AI-generated essays.
"These essays are exemplary of what a very mediocre, perhaps even a middle school, student would produce," Nguyen said. "If I were to assign a grade, the essays would get a grade of B or lower."
Wong also said the essays wouldn't stack up at "highly selective" colleges. "Admissions officers are looking for genuine emotion, careful introspection, and personal growth," he said. "The ChatGPT essays express insight and reflection mostly through superficial and cliched statements that anyone could write."
Nguyen said the writing in the essays was fluffy, trite, lacked specific details, and was overly predictable.
"There's no element of surprise, and the reader knows how the essay is going to end. These essays shouldn't end on a neat note, as if the student has it all figured out, and life is perfect," he said.
"With all three, I would scrap 80-90% and start over," he said.
