The emergence of AI tools* is creating new paradigms for writing and editing tasks, including graduate school application essays. While utilizing these new solutions to write essay drafts will undeniably be tempting for applicants – especially those writing in a second language – universities have already stated in no uncertain terms that applicants must create original essays without the support of AI tools for writing, editing, or sometimes even idea generation. Based on these parameters from universities, applicants must understand that AI tools are referencing previously created materials, and that inherently means that anything they produce will be unoriginal. To enforce these regulations, universities are employing AI writing detection software like Turnitin and GPTZero, while application readers are instructed to flag any writing that they feel is likely AI-generated.
Despite universities’ insistence that applicants not use AI in their writing process, it may be possible to employ these tools responsibly in ways that can improve one’s original essays. This post will explore these methods. However, as you read the following suggestions about how applicants might use AI without infringing on the authenticity and originality of their writing, bear in mind that Transcend Admissions does not condone using AI to write essays. All writing-related AI tools should be treated with a high level of suspicion for accuracy, and you will note throughout this post that anyone using these tools will want to do considerable proofreading and fact-checking to avoid dubious mistakes that AI tools regularly make.
*Basic grammar and editing tools like Grammarly employ elements of AI in their technology, but are not expressly considered AI tools for the purpose of this post. Here we are referring to tools like ChatGPT or Claude.ai.
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health requires that the work contained in your application (including essays) is completely accurate and exclusively your own. Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health does not permit the use of generative AI tools for idea generation and/or to edit a candidate’s work; using these tools to generate responses violates the Honor Code.
All application content is subject to verification and adherence to the above requirements.
OFFERS OF ADMISSION WILL BE RESCINDED SHOULD ANY MISREPRESENTATION AND/OR OMISSION OCCUR.**
**The statements here attributed to universities are taken from actual correspondence or application platforms for these schools and are intended to show the language universities are using as well as the differences in the ways each program may communicate their own rules.
Expand on Your Own Ideas
It’s important to remember that AI limits placed on essay writing are not simply meant to enforce tedious writing assignments. The personal essay is a crucial aspect of the application that helps the admissions committee make difficult decisions about hundreds of qualified candidates. The essays invite the applicant to shed light on personal experiences and one’s unique personality, and this is precisely what the admissions committee seeks to learn about you through your own writing. In the coming age of AI, communicating one’s individual knowledge and experiences will be increasingly important. One ethical way to use AI tools as a part of the essay writing process is to use your own original experiences and ideas to inspire new ideas, remind yourself of important details, or stimulate yourself to write more thorough or emotional descriptions. For example, after writing and editing one or more drafts of an essay, you might instruct an AI tool to ask you questions about the content as a way to test if your stories and descriptions will be clear and accessible to a reader who is otherwise unfamiliar with your background. These questions could reveal a blind spot in your storytelling or identify valuable missing details.
All documents uploaded on this page should contain only true information and your own, original content. You should not use artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, to write any portion of your essay… The (Carnegie Mellon) Heinz College Office of Admissions utilizes several methods to identify plagiarized, AI-generated, and falsified content in uploaded documents. Submission of false, plagiarized or AI-generated material as part of the application for admission may result in automatic denial of admission to any degree program.
Check for Clarity and Understanding
A common challenge that essay writers face, especially after working on many drafts of the same piece of writing, is wondering whether an essay actually does the job that they set out to do when they started putting these ideas together. One way to attempt to verify whether an essay – or individual paragraphs – gets its intended point across might be to ask an AI tool. Some example prompts to ask a tool might be:
- What is the main takeaway from this essay?
- What emotions are communicated in this paragraph?
- Is the tone of this writing active or passive?
Based on the feedback you get from one of these tools, you might then ask a friend or peer to read the essay to see if they agree with the points raised by the AI tool.
At (Illinois) Gies, we are committed to expanding access to world-class business education, fostering excellence in scholarship and teaching, fueling innovation, focusing on inclusion in all our commitments, and facilitating meaningful life-long engagement with the Gies Community in our pursuit of a shared purpose.
AI Guidance: Remember, while AI and search engine services can provide guidance and suggestions, it is important for applicants to reflect on their own unique experiences and provide authentic and personal responses to these prompts.
After carefully reading the statement above, please discuss the following questions in a 750–1000-word, double-spaced essay:
– How do your personal and professional goals fit within Gies’ commitments?
– How will completing a Gies iMBA degree help you achieve those goals?
Editing
When seeking to improve the grammar, tone, or persuasiveness of an original essay, a writer may find an AI tool useful. In the opening of this post, we mentioned that any content an AI tool generates is going to be unoriginal and, similarly, allowing an AI tool to edit an entire document is likely to result in it making some rather obvious edits and phrasing choices, many of which editors, teachers, and admissions committees have reported as easy to spot. Therefore, it is advisable to ask an AI tool an editing-related query (similar to those suggested in the section above) rather than simply inviting the tool to edit or improve the essay. The response to such a query may provide stimulating or insightful feedback that could enable the writer to refine and improve their essay in their own words. But the most important step in the editing process is the one you should do as the writer and owner of your essays (see more on this below).
Proofread + Fact Check the AI
To reiterate our advice from above, we do not condone or encourage the use of AI writing tools to generate drafts of graduate school essays. This is because, in addition to producing generic-sounding and unoriginal content, AI writing is known to be repetitive in its word use and phrasing, it can mix up or even make up names of people and places, it does not clearly understand the genders of people it may mention, and it will often make up facts and statistics, just to name a handful of potential issues. For the aforementioned reasons and several others, it is absolutely necessary that a document that has undergone any AI alterations must be proofread very closely to identify and correct any conspicuous or inaccurate wording and facts. As mentioned in the university excerpts above, failing to do so could result in immediate disqualification of an application.
Conclusion
With universities beginning to make it abundantly clear that they do not condone the use of AI tools for any application-related writing, it is probably not advisable to employ these resources and instead focus on improving one’s writing through self-editing and support from trusted peers or a consultant. If you simply cannot resist seeking assistance from an AI tool, we urge you to adhere strictly to practices (such as those listed in this post) that do not involve generating unoriginal content. To learn about how we support applicants as they brainstorm, plan, write, and edit essays on the way to admissions to their target schools, schedule a free 20-minute consultation today.