ChatGPT and the College Essay: Words, Yes. But is it Writing?
Chat GPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) can create something that looks a lot like writing. Use it in a college essay and you risk sounding like everyone else.
A recent New Yorker article called “AI is Homogenizing Our Thoughts” reported on an MIT Media Lab study in which 50 college students from around Boston wrote essays. The research scientists separated them into three groups. One group wrote using no assistance; one wrote with access to Google Search, and one wrote with access to large language models (LLMs) like Chat GPT.
They found that “the LLM users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory.”
The LLM essays were filled with common words and ideas—so common, in fact, that 80 percent of their writers couldn’t quote from their “own” work. The essays were, according to study co-author Nataliya Kosmyna, “Average, everything, all at once.”
For a college applicant, it’s not the best look.
Writing is Thinking
So many students find college admissions essays challenging. I can understand the pull to use AI to help.
The whole admissions process can also bring up some complicated feelings. Excitement, hopefully, but also sometimes anxiety. Intimidation, uncertainty … it’s tough to write while feeling any of these.
Writing, as John Warner says in his new book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, “[is] an embodied act of thinking and feeling.” It also involves speaking and listening, walking away from the draft, returning with fresh eyes, editing, and thinking some more.
For many students, this thinking leads to overthinking, which is likely to lead to frustration and a blank screen.
Essay Coaching begins our work with students by sharing our Idea Generator—an optional questionnaire. The prompts are open-ended. They’re a chance to reflect on memories and experiences and, we hope, uncover stories in unexpected places.
In our first meeting, we spend about an hour unpacking their answers. We tease out some of the best ideas and talk them through. There’s time to fill in details, ask and answer questions, and settle on a place to start writing.
It’s only natural to feel self-conscious when writing. Unlike a free-flowing conversation, you need to decide to do it and, when the overthinking arrives, decide to continue. You need to choose a keyboard or pen as a tool. Then you need to sit down, put down a first word and a string of others, and resist the urge to second guess yourself.
Our first writing assignment begins with free writing, introduced by the late professor Peter Elbow as “[simply] write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty). Don’t stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing.”
We often suggest that students begin their free-writing with a scene, using vivid detail to help the reader see, hear, and experience things like you do.
A brain dump may seem like an odd way to start such an important essay, but if you really do set that timer and don’t look back, you’ll be amazed by the quirky thoughts, odd connections, and recollections that show up on the page.
When students drop that self-consciousness, their true voices can emerge. In my many years of reading, writing, and coaching, I’ve learned that the most authentic, engaging, moving writing has a unique voice.
Put another way, free writing “reads” like a conversation. A human voice reaching a human ear.
Writing is Editing
In a successful college essay, you are the opposite of average. You’re the hero of the story: someone who is both exceptional and relatable. Your story is impressive, yes. It’s also one that another person can recognize, understand, and remember.
We have seen how readers identify with the characters they meet while reading. This is the magic connection we’re helping to create.
Free writing, or, “first thought, best thought,” as the poet Allen Ginsburg defined it, defies data and the law of averages. This messy-seeming exercise can help you start from, and land in, a more authentic place.
We return to the student’s free writing with fresh eyes, a sense of how a college essay flows, and a goal to refine.
Editing is a necessary pause, a chance to bring some perspective to the story unfolding in our heads and on the page. It’s a time to bring a student’s ideas and voice into sharper focus.
Students know their best qualities and remember the unexpected ways they’ve come in handy. They also know what colleges are looking for; thanks to technology, they can find it in seconds. They can connect the dots about how they can thrive at their top choice school. Then they can go back to the initial draft, finding places to weave in these ideas.
They can also imagine themselves in an interview, feeling confident, explaining to an admissions officer at that school why they’ll succeed there. We ask: How would you tell them the story? They jot down a few ideas and weave them through.
We read the revised drafts out loud to see how they sound to the student’s own ear—and ours. They can find and fix the places where they trip up. They can ask people they trust for their gut reactions and consider them and adjust further until they’re truly satisfied.
There’s that voice and ear again. And the gut, the true test of whether something feels right.
LLMs can approximate writing in remarkable ways. Still, a successful college or grad school admissions essay should be more than a specific count of mostly coherent words.
The aim is to stand out, rising above a sea of data with a memorable story. To achieve this, you need the full-body experience of writing: The brainstorms and the conversations. The fingers flying across the keyboard and the perspective you get by walking away and asking another person what they think.
When you use LMMs, you’re over-indexing on an average—and less likely to come out ahead.
