Can You Use AI For College Essays to Get Ahead Without Risk

College essays can be a real pain. They require a significant amount of time and effort to get right, and they can impact your grades, academic standing, and even your chances of getting into graduate school. So, it’s no surprise that many students are looking for ways to make writing college essays easier. Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and it can help you write better college essays.  This leads to the question, "Can you use AI for college essays?"  This article will explore that question and provide you with valuable insight to help you achieve your goals, like using AI tools to write better college essays, save time, and boost your grades, without breaking academic rules or risking penalties.

One of the Best AI Tools For Students that can help ease your college writing woes is HyperWrite's AI writing assistant. Using this tool, you can get help organizing your ideas, writing sections of your paper, and improving your content, all while ensuring you remain in control of the process. This will help you create a well-written, original college essay that meets academic standards.

Can You Use AI For College Essays or Is That Cheating?

Regardless of my feelings about AI (and they aren’t all negative), AI isn’t going anywhere. But can you use it to write your college essays? The short answer: no. There is a slightly longer answer as well. You could brainstorm with AI, and AI could polish up your essay. You must write your essay yourself. 

Schools Vary on How They Address the Topic

Some colleges and universities have issued official statements on their policies regarding the use of AI in admissions essays, while others have yet to address the issue publicly. Approaches vary widely across institutions.

The University of California (UC) system addresses the issue in an FAQ:
“Does UC screen for AI in applications or use it to review them?”

While UC does not utilize artificial intelligence in its application review process, it acknowledges that some students may be using AI tools, such as ChatGPT, when completing their applications.

Why Authenticity Matters More Than AI in College Applications

But be warned. Relying on AI to write your Personal Insight Questions (PIQs) could backfire.

“A personal insight question written by AI is not going to be very good, because it’s not going to teach us anything about the student,” says Robert Penman, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at UC Davis and former admissions officer at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside.

How UC Detects and Responds to AI-Generated Application Content

“It’s not going to help us understand more about the student in their context, their hopes and dreams, their trials and tribulations, their achievements. A machine can’t generate that; it has to come from the student.”

Using AI as a brainstorming tool is one thing; submitting a fully AI-generated response is another. UC considers the latter a form of academic dishonesty. Applications undergo plagiarism checks, and if your PIQs are found to be generated by AI using unattributed content, you risk being disqualified from UC admission entirely.

Georgia Tech Advises Students to Use AI with Caution

Just as you wouldn’t copy directly from a book or website, you shouldn’t copy and paste content from an AI platform or submit work you didn’t create yourself. 

Instead, think of AI as a support tool, something that can help you brainstorm ideas, explore alternative phrasing, or structure your thoughts. But in the end, the writing should be unmistakably yours.

Preserving Your Voice: Caltech’s Stance on AI and Authenticity

As Caltech puts it:

“Your essays are where we hear your voice. Relying on AI, specifically large language models such as ChatGPT or Bard, to craft your essay will dilute your unique expression and perspective. While we know AI tools have become readily accessible over recent months, overuse of AI will diminish your individual, bold, creative identity as a prospective Techer.”

If you're unsure whether your use of AI is ethical, Caltech offers a simple test:

• Would it be acceptable for a trusted adult to perform the same task you're asking of ChatGPT?
• Can a teacher review your essay for grammar and spelling? Absolutely.
• Can that same teacher write a draft of your essay for you to revise and submit? Absolutely not.

Only You Can Write in Your Voice

Will Geiger estimates that he read around 10,000 college application essays during his years in college admissions and scholarship review, all before ChatGPT entered the scene in 2022. Not long after, he began noticing a shift. The essays started to feel less like they were written by 17- or 18-year-olds.

He observed more formulaic five-paragraph structures, an increase in essays written in the form of letters, and a recurring pattern of repeated phrases and examples across submissions. Words like “cornerstone” and “bedrock,” rarely used by teenagers, began appearing more often.

The Rise of AI-Assisted Essays: What Scholarship Experts Are Noticing

“They felt a little bit sterile,” said Geiger, cofounder and CEO of Scholarships360, an online platform that helped over 300,000 students last year search for and apply to scholarships.

Curious, Geiger and his team ran nearly 1,000 submitted essays through GPTZero, an AI-detection tool. The results suggested that approximately 42% had likely been composed with the assistance of generative AI. With college decisions rolling in for seniors and juniors preparing their own essays, Geiger is concerned.

Balancing Authenticity and AI: A Smarter Approach to Essay Writing

“The essay is one of the few opportunities in the admissions process for a student to communicate directly with a scholarship committee or an admissions reader,” he said.
“That’s a powerful chance to share who you are. I don’t think an AI tool can do that.”

Still, Geiger acknowledges that fear of sounding generic is valid. A bland or impersonal essay can hurt a student’s chances. But that doesn’t mean generative AI must be avoided altogether.

Instead of using it to write full drafts, students can use AI ethically for: 

• Outlining
• Grammar correction
• Clarity

Some tools even help flag whether a teacher might suspect AI involvement. Used responsibly, AI can enhance an essay, not replace it.

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How to Use AI for College Essays to Boost Clarity and Creativity

Brainstorming Ideas: Jumpstart Your Essay with AI

AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are great for brainstorming ideas. If you thoughtfully prompt them, these tools will deliver you a whole host of concepts. You can then further refine the results with additional questions, such as: “How would you further develop this idea?” or “what are some specific examples of this?”  When used in this way, AI can definitely help jumpstart your ideation process. 

Helping With Outlines: Get Organized with AI

Another thing that AI is great at is outlining an idea. For example, say you’ve narrowed down essay concepts to your top 3-5 ideas, any of which will support the story that you are presenting about me. Now ask AI to outline each idea for you. 

An outline can help you see the arc of your essay, how it develops, where it lands, and all the stops along the way. 

• Would you be excited to write this essay? 
• Does the concept feel true to you? 
• Or would writing some of these sections feel like drudgery? 

AI-generated outlines can help you hone in on an essay idea that excites and motivates you.

Recasting Sentences: Use AI to Find Your Voice

Another benefit of AI tools is rewording text. This can be beneficial in several ways. 

You can ask AI to: 

• Rewrite an awkward sentence. 
• Rephrase a paragraph to make the writing clearer. 
• Suggest a summary paragraph, based on your previous paragraphs.
•  Edit your draft for better sentence structure and flow. 

Just be sure that the end result retains your voice and personality. Don’t forget that colleges assign essays to get to know you, so be personal and prove that you’re a strong fit for the school. 

Grammar, Spelling, and Synonyms: The Right Tool for the Job

Some students use generative AI tools for help with grammar and spelling. And they can certainly help you find a better or different word for something. If grammar and spelling are a genuine concern, there are other AI tools specifically designed as grammar checkers, such as Grammarly, that are much more effective in this regard. And for spelling, Google Docs has spell check, and everyone should be using it. 

Language Translation: AI Can Help Multilingual Students

Where AI text writers can be beneficial is in translating text from a student’s primary language to English. It can make idiomatic expressions more colloquial and can make your writing more fluid. 

And as long as you have written the essay first in your primary language, expressing all your original thoughts, the translation should read as authentic and not be flagged by AI-writing detectors. 

Best Practices for Ethically Using AI Tools for College Essays

We’ve developed several best practices to guide you in making informed decisions when using AI. 

Integrate, Don’t Replace

AI should complement your writing efforts, not replace them. Sharing a personal story will always be the strongest way to approach writing a college essay. Admissions officers want to read essays that are uniquely you. Don’t ask a robot to write a human story. 

Stay Updated

AI tools can be helpful, but they also have limitations. It’s wise to conduct thorough research before implementing an AI tool. Knowing how a tool works and using it effectively can be the difference between a thoughtless essay and a thoughtful essay. 

Ethical Considerations

AI is not human, but humans created it. Unfortunately, this means that any unconscious biases its creators possess will be reflected in the technology. It’s critical to be mindful of these biases when using AI. 

AI is imperfect; while constantly evolving, AI makes mistakes and can generate incorrect or completely fabricated information. We recommend only using AI as a supplement to your own work. Using AI to write your essays and complete your assignments can (and likely will) have consequences.

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Try our AI Writing Assistant to Write Natural-sounding Content

ChatGPT and similar tools are great for generating content, but they can produce text that sounds overly robotic or generic. College students need an AI writing tool that personalizes information and suggestions to their unique voice. HyperWrite does just that. 

HyperWrite: Personalised AI Writing That Sounds Like You

HyperWrite pairs state-of-the-art AI with deep personalization, so every suggestion sounds like you on your best day. From instant email drafts and blog outlines to in-line sentence rewrites, our writing-focused chatbot and integrated document editor make writing effortless. Students receive accurate, cited content for essays that don't sound like they were written by ChatGPT. 

Professionals transform rough thoughts into polished content quickly, expressing ideas in more precise language with ensured accuracy. Collaborate directly with AI inside the document editor and discover how fast thoughtful writing can be. Create your free account and start writing with an AI writing assistant that gets you.

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