A controversial take on a hot industry topic: is using Chat GPT to write your college essay cheating? Maybe, maybe not. It’s all about how you use it.
Duke University announced this week they would no longer assign a numerical value to the essay as part of a student’s application: the rampant use of AI and of college writing coaches and consultants (like me!) skews the essay as a metric of a student’s independent writing ability. However, it can still give useful insights into their character.
When is it cheating to use a tool?
You can almost always cheat in life– including cheating on your college essay. So the question is, will you? Which begs the question, in the age of AI, is using Chat GPT to write your essay considered cheating?
It depends. And it’s not a new question.
In college, I took a torturous 8AM Ancient Greek language class: Thucydides & The Peloponnesian War. Think: convoluted grammar, and geopolitics of long-dead people and long buried wars. Bellicosity, and weak dining hall caffeine.
In a perfect world, independent work (or homework) is designed to enhance or embed learning. It’s designed for you to struggle a bit to retrieve the knowledge your ego thinks you’ve stored and mastered.
However, at 2AM, when you’re stuck in a thorny section of translation, with pages left to go, and even caffeine has given up on you, what do you do?
In the late 1990’s, there was no Chat-GPT, but you could look up the entire English translation of the Ancient Greek writers online- sometimes with word-for-word correspondence. You could get that homework done, correctly, on time, and by a 2:30AM bed time. Pretty tempting.
Two obvious issues with cheating on your work:
1) Ethically, you didn’t really do the work by yourself.
2) The next time you hit that problem, you haven’t learned anything about how to solve it. The only thing you know how to do is where to find someone else’s answer.
How to use Chat-GPT for your college essay- WITHOUT cheating!
Let AI write versions of the essay, study it, and trash it!
Step One: Copy-paste one of the Common App essay prompts you’re interested in into the Chat GPT text box. Read what it spits out. Proceed with caution.
Step Two: Give Chat GPT further instructions in its text box to modify how you want it to respond, based on a story you’re considering telling in your essay. You’ll have to add some specific biographical or personal details. Read what it spits out.
Step Three: Give Chat GPT even further instructions in its text box to adjust for tone or other craft details. Examples: “Respond in a more quirky tone.” Read what it spits out!
You are NOT using this as a draft. You are using this for studying and critical thinking ONLY. Then it will go forever in the garbage!
Three helpful ways to apply critical thinking to the Chat-GPT-generated college essay:
- Use Chat-GPT as market and audience research. What AI spits out first will be the most general and cliched written product.
- What is the structure of the essay? How does it start? Transition? End?
- What can you learn about the audience’s expectations of the genre?
- What “lessons” or “insights” does AI force on this prompt?
- Road test your specifics
- Now, adjust so that Chat GPT is forced to reckon with some of your personal details. You might write, “Rewrite about a girl who got kicked out of her school orchestra for bringing a pet duck to rehearsal.”
- Analyze: what changed in AI’s response?
- You can repeat this clarifying instructions for any part of the essay, e.g. “Make the conclusion focused on the value of cross-species imprinting.”
- Road test for tone
- Try on different tones- what about if it’s more somber? Sarcastic? Intellectualized? Compare those versions. Which do you like better? Which might be more likely to land with an admissions reader?
- What if you lead with an anecdote, instead, then surprise the reader with where you go next? Defy our expectations?
Then, Reflect
Reflect on these exercises: as a writer, you’ll use everything you’ve learned about structure, audience, importance of specificity of detail, and impact of tone. But you won’t use something Chat-GPT wrote. You’ll throw the AI-generated essay out.
Instead, apply what you’ve learned from Chat-GPT into your own crafting process. Write a first draft, quickly. Read it out loud. How does it sound? Where can you go from here? How can the story sound and feel more like you at your best? Is the structure supporting your story well? Is it unfolding in a logical, emotionally moving way an audience can follow and invest in?
You Really Can’t Do Better than YOU
Chat GPT is not there for you to cheat with. It should not be writing your essay for you. It’s just a tool.
You should be using its machine-generated insights for elevating–not cheapening– the work and thinking of the human you are. After all, applying to higher education implies you see some value in critical thinking, in self-development. Why not use whatever tools you can to do that even better?
Plus, the real vulnerability of personal writing resonates and teaches you something on a deep level. Don’t let AI take all the emotional thrills and inner learning from your process.
A Note on plagiarism
Remember, anything you didn’t write yourself that you use in your essay IS plagiarism. That definition isn’t soft or arguable.
Of course, none of us really knows how admissions processes will change due to Chat GPT, or AI writ large. It could be as radical: many more schools besides Duke may give up on the essay as a useful metric (But not yet! Stay strong, admissions 2024!).
However, telling your story, with insights into you, in YOUR way, is still a deeply valuable life exercise. And one likely to pay off in full.
Not sure how to do this? Want us to look at a draft? Anxious about essays or telling your story?
We’ve got you. Book before March 31, 2024, and you’re gifted last year’s rates! Contact us here.
If you’re ready to write NOW, book your complimentary admissions essay writing consult HERE. And tell your friends!
Additional reading -from Harvard in the Washington Post:
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