Using ChatGPT to review your college essay.
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Anonymous
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Review--not to write--just review.
I saw a Reddit post where a kid posted his personal statement into ChatGPT and it gave him some pretty interesting feedback. Are kids allowed to do that? I know using it to write an essay is not allowed, but wasn't sure about using it as an editor. https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1fmmm4q/asked_chatgpt_to_read_my_essay_from_the/ |
Anonymous
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Yes. They can. There are apps just for this.
Kollegio Sups Esai Admityogi Search on here for these names to see what has been written before. It’s all about democratizing the college application process. What it will mean is that there will be a lot more essays than all sound really good this year. And very few outliers. |
Anonymous
Google? |
Anonymous
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How you can use ChatGPT to help you – with the right prompts
ChatGPT isn’t a total loss for college essays. There are ways it can be helpful. What you need are the right prompts. We’ve spent many, many hours experimenting with ChatGPT and developing prompts that yield useful results. We’ll share more about the prompts in a future article. Here’s three ways we’ve found to make ChatGPT more helpful. Get ChatGPT to help you think about what to write about. AI can be a not-bad brainstorming guide. We’ve figured out how to get ChatGPT to provide a line of questioning that will help you build out more compelling content. Just be careful – ChatGPT doesn’t have a great understanding of what colleges are looking for in essays. So you need to include that type of content in the prompt you provide (e.g., asking it to use the 5 Traits Colleges Look for in Essays to guide you, copying and pasting the 5 Traits from this article). Provide feedback on the content and structure of your draft. You can give ChatGPT a draft you wrote and ask it for feedback on how to make it better. It’s important to add explicit questions you want it to answer (e.g., “What didn’t you learn that you wanted to learn?”). But once again, be careful. Adding relevant content to your prompt (e.g., the 5 Traits) will help ChatGPT provide better feedback. You can even ask ChatGPT for an example outline for restructuring your essay in ways that’ll make it more compelling. Help you figure out ways to reduce your word count. As writing coaches, we find many students struggle when writing to a word count. ChatGPT can help – again, with the right prompt. If you ask it to make your draft more concise, it’ll heavily rewrite what you have (even changing your voice) – not a good option. Giving ChatGPT a word count target also doesn’t work, as we said, as ChatGPT doesn’t have a good sense of word count. We’ve found using the language “minimally edit” in your prompt does a decent job of identifying words and phrases you could cut without doing much rewriting. This is especially powerful when you also indicate specific things you want ChatGPT to look for as it edits, such as removing unnecessary details or prepositional phrases. You can then take ChatGPT’s output and feed it into a document comparison tool (Google Docs, Word) to see which edits ChatGPT made (ChatGPT isn’t good at comparing documents). Then, you can determine which edits you want to use, not use, or modify. https://www.myprompt.com/post/should-you-use-chatgpt-for-your-college-essay |
Anonymous
| My daughter wrote a great essay and needed ideas for how to end it. ChatGPT gave her a few ideas. |
Anonymous
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The problem isn't people using ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, etc. to write the essays from the ground up - it's having these tools to tune and refine the essays.
I suspect the majority of students are going to begin using these tools going forward; it's naive to assume otherwise. Try taking one of your essays and throwing it into ChatGPT - ask it to clean it up, make it more professional or persuasive or insightful, improve the vocabulary, etc. Now which one do you want to send to an Ivy? I know - I'd rather be authentically myself than turn in work that wasn't my own. Ok...maybe, but do you still feel that way knowing that all of your peers aren't necessarily so virtuous? Do you still feel that way if it means the difference between your dream school and a safety? I'm not advocating anyone use these tools, but it is a slippery slope, particularly when you know everyone else is using them. |
Anonymous
| You can use it for editing….there are better tools than ChatGPT |
Anonymous
| I think it's a mistake. The idiosyncrasies of how you express yourself are the aspects that let your voice come through. AI will take away your voice and your authenticity, which are the exact things you are trying to get across in the essay. |
Anonymous
| Some colleges require you to attest in the application that you did not use AI. |
Anonymous
Like what? Free? |
Anonymous
Not if you realize it’s suggestions and choose the ones that make sense. |
Anonymous
You have to pick and choose. If you copy it whole, sure its a mistake. If you use it like an essay editor, and decide how/if to incorporate suggestions, its no different than paying Sara H $1000 to edit your essay and give you a "ready to submit" personal essay...... Really it does democratize the entire process. Expect international and FGLI apps to look a lot better this cycle. |
Anonymous
| soon there will be a bunch of short response questions during an SAT-style test. and that will be the end of essays |
Anonymous
I wonder if it could backfire. AO are already wary of how much help international students get on essays and then they come barely able to write complete sentences that are coherent in English. |
Anonymous
| You're giving OpenAI permission to use your work in training. I wouldn't do it, personally. |