Using AI on College Application Essays

The Common App, which many U.S. colleges use, updated its fraud policy in 2023. Submitting substantive content from an artificial intelligence platform as your own work now counts as fraud. Individual colleges set their own rules on top of that, and they vary. Some, such as Caltech, have published examples of acceptable uses, like checking grammar, next to unacceptable ones, like having a tool write the draft. Others describe AI as allowed in roughly the way feedback from a teacher or counselor is allowed, as long as the ideas and the writing are yours. Because policies differ, the safest approach is to read each college's admissions website and any statement you are asked to sign. The uses most often described as acceptable fall at the start and end of the process. At the start, AI can help you brainstorm by asking you questions about your experiences. At the end, it can act as a proofreader. The unacceptable middle is generating paragraphs, rewriting your draft into a 'better' version, or supplying the anecdotes and reflections that the essay is supposed to show. There is also a practical reason to keep AI away from your sentences. Admissions readers see thousands of essays, and AI prose tends to sound alike: polished, general and full of familiar phrases. The details that make an essay memorable, like a specific smell, an exact thing someone said or an odd habit, are ones only you know. A common misconception is that colleges catch AI mainly with detection software. Detectors are unreliable. OpenAI withdrew its own AI text classifier in 2023 because it wasn't accurate enough, and a 2023 Stanford study found detectors often mislabeled essays by non-native English writers as AI-generated. The real risk is less about getting caught and more about handing in an essay that doesn't sound like you.