Artificial Essays: College essays shouldn’t be abolished despite the growing advancements of artificial intelligence

ChatGPT can write English essays, historical analysis, synthesize sources and even compose music. Some say the next device AI will take over is college essays — rendering them obsolete in a realm of new technology that allows any student to forge an immense personal statement.

But college essays are an essential part of the college admissions process, and they shouldn’t go away just because of the creation of AI. While some universities haven’t made direct policies addressing the use of AI in college essays, others have implied that AI shouldn’t be incorporated into a final draft. According to The New York Times, the University of Michigan Law School has guidelines that state “applicants ought not use ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence tools as part of their drafting process.” 

College essays provide an opportunity for high school students to describe their background — such as past experiences that have shaped the way they learn or build friendships. Without essays, there’d be no way to differentiate applicants’ personalities aside from quantitative information in emotionless transcripts and number of service hours.

Writing a college essay uses individuality, topics are specific to a person. Grades and ACT scores don’t offer what a personalized essay can. If essays are completely cut-out of the process, an application is simply numbers on a page.

For instance, if a student has struggled in school due to dealing with depression, a college essay gives a chance to address that. Students can explain a significant drop in grades their sophomore year because they spent more time at the hospital with a relative with cancer than in math class.

Each personalized essay with real-life details can’t be replicated by AI that currently has to be trained on pre-existing writing. As of now, AI is unable to formulate entirely original messages and requires inspiration.

39% of students at East have used an AI powered tool at least once, according to an Instagram poll of 198 votes. The goal of AI is to produce an answer or writing that resembles what a human would — something that requires emotion.

However, just because you enter a few words describing who you are to AI — that doesn’t make anything personal. It’s creating a false sense of how you describe yourself and present yourself as a student. Using AI makes it effortless to create a false personality through your essay — your writing should be about the true version of you, not what a robot comes up with for you.

Plus, choosing to use AI for a college essay runs the risk of being blacklisted from colleges. The main Common App essay specifically is submitted to multiple colleges, so using AI could backfire to multiple potential schools at once.

This risk should be reason enough to shy students away from plagiarism while applying and renders abolishing college essays as a whole an overly-extreme measure. AI checkers like OpenAI Text Classifier and GPTZero have been shown to work 98% of the time, according to Turnitin.

Abolishing college essays would harm students too.

The purpose of colleges is to educate students, and writing college essays — though awkward and not fun to some — is an important coming-of-age rite of passage for seniors. By hyper-focusing on what makes them unique, each student gains valuable insight into their personality and life goals before starting college.

As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, colleges should regularly reconsider whether essays remain a relevant part of admissions. If ChatGPT can write nuanced essays with metaphors and greater themes behind compelling passions for math, literature or science, then the college essay should be abolished.

Though, AI is not advanced enough to warrant trashing college essays all together. College essays give students the chance to individualize their writing and describe who you are as a person — instead of a robot doing it for you.