3 reasons why using AI to write your college essay is a bad idea

As increasingly sophisticated AI chatbot writing assistants proliferate, it’s unsurprising that today’s college applicants would search for an alternative to do-it-yourself writing. Many high school students either lack confidence in their writing skills, are leery about baring their souls in a composition that’s all about themselves, or both. Rather than simply consulting a guide on how to write a college essay, entering short essay prompts into an AI program could become their go-to shortcut, given how many younger people tend to easily embrace technology.

AI technology adoption has accelerated at a time when the pressure to craft  the strongest possible college application essay has become more intense. The admissions bar is higher, as many top colleges and universities have become increasingly selective. In addition, some admissions offices are paying closer attention to the quality of applicants’ essays. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions embraced test-optional policies that no longer require submission of standardized test scores, removing a key factor for evaluating applicants and thereby increasing the weight of essays in overall assessments.

But is using AI to write an application essay the best approach, given the important role that the composition could have in influencing which institutions extend admissions offers―thereby shaping a student’s education and future?

The case for writing your own college essay without relying on AI

Here are three reasons why it may be a bad idea to use AI to write a college essay.

1 Personality counts―In reviewing essays, admissions officers are trying to get a sense of an applicant’s personal voice and what makes that student unique, since other factors such as school grades are more objective measures that may reveal little about the individual.  According to Nancy Steenson, a college admissions coach, an application essay “is not academic writing … It's using your voice to tell a story about yourself, to give them something about yourself that they might not see on the college application. As such, AI is useless here.” Perfect grammar and compositional structure aren’t necessarily as important as coming across as unique, memorable, and authentic, Steenson says. While AI’s capabilities to produce quality, on-topic writing can depend heavily on the strength of the prompts that are fed into an AI program, AI-written content can be mechanical; it may fall short in capturing the unique voice or emotional tone that a person uses in describing themselves, their aspirations, and their passions. AI scrapes the vastness of the internet to produce written content, but what it scrapes won’t represent your voice; it could even make you sound generic and lacking in personality.

2 Humans are better than AI at writing―The Washington Post published a January 2024 story summarizing its findings after asking an AI prompt engineer to create college essays using AI and then having a former admissions counselor evaluate them alongside human-written essays. While the AI essays were readable and mostly free of grammatical errors, the former counselor concluded that they were mediocre overall and would likely do more to diminish an application than to help it.

3 You could get caught―College admissions officers are typically skilled at differentiating between authentic essays and those that are AI-generated, and essays falling into the latter category are likely to result in rejection of the entire application. Moreover, given the disruptive effect of AI in education and heightened concerns about plagiarism, a sort of arms race has developed, with admissions officers deploying AI tools to screen application materials and identify essays containing telltale signs of AI generation. An Intelligent.com survey conducted in September 2023 found that 50% of U.S. college admissions offices reported that they used AI to review applications; by the end of 2024, 82% of institutions planned to use AI. Do you really want to risk getting caught by relying on AI to write an essay, and potentially be seen as trying to gain an unfair advantage over applicants who wrote their own essays, unaided by AI?

Negatives aside, AI shouldn’t necessarily be considered off-limits entirely as a tool to assist in the overall creative process that goes into writing an essay. Many writers―professionals and amateurs alike―use AI to brainstorm as a prewriting exercise. If high-quality prompts are entered into an AI program, the technology may be helpful for overcoming writer’s block and simply getting started. AI can also help to create an outline or narrow down the topics to cover in a composition.

However, at some point in the process of writing a college essay, the writer must reveal something intensely personal. Before putting AI in charge, it’s worth asking: How do you want to go about telling college admissions officers about yourself―by having the courage to bare your soul and write the essay yourself or outsourcing the task to a still-evolving technology and knowing that you took a shortcut in your college application? And if you do receive an acceptance letter, would you feel better  about yourself knowing that the opportunity came in part as a result of an essay that you wrote rather than one generated by AI?