Why do all College admissions Essays Sound the Same now?
We’ve written about the issue of AI college essays before, and why using AI is not a good idea. Among other reasons, schools are using AI Detectors, and unlike an essay you’re writing for a professor, you will never know their AI Detector false flags you. The admissions process is secretive, and their reactions to your admissions essay will be shrouded in secrecy. The fact that the admissions process is secret means that college admissions essay readers have more leeway to form their own beliefs without you knowing about them. Unlike a professor, they don’t need to fail you and give you a chance to defend yourself. They have the option to deny you admission.
Now, there’s a new twist. Some of the most common advice provided by college counselors to use AI “ethically” with your admissions essay may be backfiring. This advice includes using ChatGPT or Grammarly to rephrase your sentences or brainstorm with AI for ideas. Why? Your peers are using exactly the same strategies on their admissions essays. As a result, all the essays are beginning to sound identical.
How Important is the Human Factor in a College Admissions Essay?
How is ChatGPT possibly ruining your admissions essay, even if you used the guidelines that college counselors advise? Simply put, the software streamlined it using the same underlying AI algorithms.
The essays have become indistinguishable, with everyone following the same advice on the internet. After applicants sent ChatGPT billions of prompts to develop an outline for an admissions essay about <insert necessary life experience>, ChatGPT trained itself and began handing out the same outline and strategic ideas it gave hundreds of thousands of other students.
The problem has now grown so significantly that essay readers say that repetition occurs in “the quality of word choice, sentence structure, sentence variability, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, length, and more in an applicant’s essay.”
Don’t Believe Us? Here’s Proof
- Assuming the article published in Forbes is correct, consider not using AI to outline or inspire. Be true to your inner self, and just sit down and write. If everyone else outlines or uses ChatGPT for inspiration, you’re giving away your personal experiences and history to train ChatGPT. It will turn around and use that data on the next potential applicant with a similar experience who will input the same prompt.
- For example, here is the outline (link PDF doc there) that was given to us by ChatGPT so we could write an essay about being an intern in DC stuck on photocopying duty. ChatGPT generated the essay based on that outline and the score. Can you spot the similarities? Let’s say you had an internship in Washington, DC, over the summer, and all you did was make photocopies. Then, you come home excited to apply to college, follow the suggested ethical guidelines to use ChatGPT, and create an outline of your summer experience. Ta-da! Whether or not you generate the essay with ChatGPT, you’ll look like every other person in the same boat because ChatGPT will give them almost identical outlines.
What can I do if I outline my college admissions essay using ChatGPT?
- Note what the Forbes article discussed. We write our blogs for business purposes. Even though we don’t use AI, we have to format them to follow some rules. But you don’t need to do that on a college admissions essay. Feel free to play with paragraph and sentence length. If you’re using a grammar/spellchecker, just use the punctuation, spelling, and grammar support. Also, you don’t need to accept EVERY suggestion on vocabulary replacement or sentence restructuring. As an example, every time we used the word “exactly” in this blog, our grammar/punctuation tool suggested “precisely.” We decided to ignore it. Confer with an admissions professional, but do you really need to make EVERY sentence read in active voice? Sometimes, writing sounds very elegant in passive voice. We decided to take our own advice and mostly ignore our AI spelling/grammar assistant for this piece. We might reformat it for sentence and paragraph length before posting. Still, the evidence is mounting that boring writing on the internet is so prevalent that even Google prefers indexing pieces that don’t follow every SEO rule.
- As noted above, don’t use ChatGPT to outline your college essay. But if you DID use ChatGPT to summarize an essay, scan it using AI Detector Pro because it will show you the parts that sound very AI. After that, look at it closely and apply your imagination and creativity. Start right away by differentiating the hook. Do you need to describe the marble? Then, change the thesis. Maybe admit the internship was terrible.
For example, consider flipping the outline on its head. Every terrible experience doesn’t need to be a learning opportunity. We’ve all had that terrible internship and endured it because we made a promise and committed to something. What can commitment to a mediocre experience teach us? Every year, colleges deal with children that can’t commit and drop out. They know every professor isn’t going to be the most earth-shattering educator. Why can’t your photocopying internship be less about a learning experience about democracy and more about learning to stick through the times that aren’t fun? We can’t write your essays for you, and we highly encourage you NOT to use us to rewrite the essay using our humanizer. Instead, we suggest using AI Detector Pro to detect the most banal and AI-generated portions of your college admissions essay and find ways to make it different.