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- Continue Reading …