I’m going to attempt to lay out both my (CEG’s Editorial Director Andy here. Hi.) views and CEG’s views on AI (such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and the college application writing process. I’m specifying “both” because I believe these views largely align, but our company is very much not a monolith, and people within the company may have different takes.
Because this issue is a complex one, I’m going to be as simple and direct as possible (As in, generally avoiding our usual playful tone. And very few parentheticals.). And also because of said complexity, all of this should likely be read with a large *subject to change as circumstances shift.
To understand my view of AI + college application essays, I believe it’s useful to understand how I view the process of writing a personal statement for college, as it undergirds everything:
I don’t view a great personal statement as the goal of this process. I view it as a fantastic byproduct.
Here’s what I mean by that.
I think the purpose of a lot of the most valuable writing humans do, and especially college app writing, is to practice and develop skills of reflection and metacognition (as in, an awareness of how one’s mind works) that help a human being better understand themselves and how they want to spend their limited time in the world. (And, through metacognitive awareness, how what they think they want has itself been shaped, so they can consider how they may want to reshape it.)
(I know I said I’d limit the parentheticals. Sorry.)
I think that kind of reflection is generally slow and difficult, since students have, on average, rarely if ever been asked to engage in it, and also leads to students feeling like this was an empowering and meaningful process. Kind of like this:
“No matter where I end up, I will always be grateful that I got to embark on this journey of self-exploration and reflection with you.”
— one of our former students
In a culture with few-to-no rites of passage, I think this kind of writing can function as a great one, one in which students begin to claim their sense of identity and meaning.
Which brings us to AI.
I think there may be ways that AI can be used to achieve at least some degree of the above. And if so, it could be (or become) a great tool to incorporate into a student’s writing process.
If AI can help a student better understand themselves and how they see the world, then we should change our systems to use it.
But to whatever degree that AI is used simply to punch out what a student or family thinks will print their admission ticket to [X good school here according to silly ranking systems], I think AI does a disservice to students, robbing them of a limited opportunity.
There are, to my mind, obvious ethical concerns with using AI, though I think there are also surprising complexities and subtleties here to explore. For example, the ethics of OpenAI using data gathered from the Internet as the basis for its neural network to then generate text are different from the ethics of a student using said model to generate an essay which are different from the ethics of a student who has written an essay asking ChatGPT (or GPT4, etc.) for advice on how the essay could be improved. With that last one, for example, I’m not clear yet on how it’s fundamentally different for, say, an under-resourced student to use ChatGPT to get notes for revision that might be effectively the same as what a student at a wealthy private school gets from a counselor.
And I think there is potential for large language models to lead to better education systems, personalized learning, and greater equity. Though all of that comes with a large *our society has generally not been good at this asterisk.
And I’m curious how AIs can be harnessed and partnered with to possibly lead to better college essays through greater introspection. I’m not sure how long college essays are for the world. I’d think this year, it’s virtually certain they still exist. In two years, probably—changing an entire institutional system is daunting, and institutional inertia is a thing. Five? Feels like that could easily be a coin toss. Maybe even weighted to one side.
If college essays go away, my biggest worry is what we might lose with them: a chance (one of the few our culture offers) to dig in and explore what a human values and why they value it.
Take care, and hope your days are dancing.
Andy and the CEG Team
Andrew Simpson has worked as an educator, consultant, and curriculum writer for the past 15 years, and earned degrees from Stanford in Political Science and Drama. He feels most at home on mountain tops and in oceans.
Top Values: Insight/Growth | Truth | Integrity
