AI and College Essays

How are your college essay drafts coming along?  I saw a LOT of students who were wanting help with their essays and got email drafts of essays from many more so I know that this is definitely a stressful point of emphasis for many seniors right now.  I wanted to give you a few reminders related to AI and your essays.

1. Do NOT use AI to write your essay for you!  That is a hard no.  If you want to go to college, write your own essay.  There are a million reasons for this, but let's be honest, you already know that you should so just do it - write it yourself and get it over with.

2. You CAN use AI to help give you feedback about your essay.  But you should only be using this tool in the same way that you would ask a parent, teacher or friend to review your essay.  You shouldn't be asking any of those people to re-write your essay draft and you shouldn't use AI for that purpose either.  And you're possibly thinking, but you just said we can use it to give us feedback and that is true.  Feedback is different than rewriting your essay!

One of the questions I think is really helpful to ask anyone editing your essay to tell you is, "what did you learn about me" when reading my essay and making sure that the message they came away with is the same one that you had intended.  This would be an example of the type of feedback you can appropriately use AI to help you with as well.  Prompting for feedback on what characteristics/ values were explicitly or implicity conveyed in the essay can be a great use of AI.

You can also use AI to provide general suggestions to consider when you are revising your essay.  Perhaps it will point out that you use the same words repeatedly throughout your essay or that you would benefit from varying your sentence structure, but asking for suggestions vs having AI rewrite it is the essential element of what is vs is not acceptable.

Good luck as you continue working on revising your essays!