Perfect! Needs work. Well done. Come see me after class.
Students have faced feedback on essays from many teachers over the years, allowing them to adapt to critiques and produce stylized writing. The overarching mission for mastering essay writing is to connect with the compassionate human reader on the other end, especially when it comes to graded work or applications. In crafting precise sentences and personal anecdotes, students pride themselves in their ability to incite emotion among fellow students and graders. Yet now, the probability of common app essays – one of the most important pieces of writing students will create – being read and scored by a human rather than a robot is declining.
Though admissions offices agonize over the possibility of receiving AI-enhanced essays from students, they are increasingly turning to AI to process those essays. Recently, sources such as the Daily Tarheel (DTH) have been alerted by UNC-Chapel Hill Media Relations of their use of artificial intelligence programs in the review process. They have adopted a platform called Slate AI in an attempt to streamline the admissions process. This can summarize the most important aspects of an application to aid the application officers. However, it also includes a Reader AI that pre-reads documents such as essays and recommendation letters, and can summarize what the reviewer needs to know. UNC Media Relations has been open about using this to perform a preliminary evaluation of the applicant’s grammar and writing skills.
While AI has recently made headlines in countless news outlets, its use in college admissions is not necessarily a recent development. A 2023 UNC graduate reviewed his admissions file in 2020 to find that his essays had been scored by Slate AI on a scale from one to four based on writing quality. According to admission reader guidelines, this number reflects vocabulary quality, grammar, length, sentence structure and sentence variation. These auto-generated scores can be found on Slate Reader Dashboards from the 2022-23 and 2023-24 admission years as well, showing how integrated this technology has become. Students discovered these scores since the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) grants students the right to review their admissions file for any public university.
UNC’s use of this technology can be seen as an attempt to streamline rapidly increasing applicant pools. From the 2019 to 2024 admission season, the number of UNC applicants rose by 57%. Despite this, some AI adversaries call for other methods to be used, such as hiring more officers, changing the review process or shortening the application. Others don’t see the need for application essays if they are not being read at all.
Slate AI promises that the integration of this program will provide “intelligent insights,” “enhance decision-making” and “empower your team to focus on what truly matters—human connections.” UNC admission review guidelines assure applicants that these AI scores give the reviewer an idea of writing quality, yet reading the entirety of the essay is crucial for the reader to gain a true sense of the student’s writing abilities. However, this fails to comfort many as Media Relations addressed the fact that there is no true legal obligation to read the essays for undergraduate admission review. Media relations did not comment on the influence of these scores on the final admission decision. Additionally, no one from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions was available to interview with the DTH about their essay review process.
The integration of AI technologies is not exclusive to this familiar in-state school. Intelligent, a higher education research and ranking organization, surveyed 399 admissions professionals from schools (21% of which were private high schools and 79% of which were higher education facilities) to determine how widespread the use of AI is. They projected that 82% of these admissions departments will utilize AI in some way by 2024. These schools use this resource to communicate with applicants and conduct interviews, as well as to review essays, letters of recommendation and transcripts. Of the schools that currently use AI, 87% say that it will ‘sometimes’ (43%) or ‘always’ (44%) make final decisions about whether to admit an applicant. While the majority of these institutions use AI to increase efficiency, they also largely aim to make more informed decisions and decrease bias. However, 65% of all admissions professionals surveyed reported being ‘somewhat’ or ‘very concerned’ about the ethical implications of AI.
The use of this technology by admission offices is being flamed online by those who see this as a double standard. Students are constantly reminded of the dangers of AI: its ability to provide fabricated statistics, inaccurate sources and misleading information. Therefore, many applicants still see AI as unreliable and are perturbed by the fact that admissions offices are utilizing a tool that could misinterpret information and provide inaccuracies. The office’s dependence on this can also create a positive feedback loop, as students feed their essays to AI to tailor their work to be favored by these new grading machines. By having chatbots grade their essays, applicants claim this will give them a better idea of what the Reader AI prefers.
Overall, many schools place high importance on the essay section as a crucial way for students to show who they are outside their statistics. These essays are often necessary for a comprehensive review of an application, and students tend to put tremendous amounts of effort into creating authentic responses. Consequently, many applicants are put off by the fact that they struggled for months to sum up their entire human experiences in 250 or 650 words– only to have their words fed into an AI. Though many students are worried about the use of AI in the application review process, universities are confident that this advancement will improve the admissions cycle.
