Should I use AI to write a school admissions essay?
I used to worry that when an admissions essay had grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors, a school would think a student hadn’t taken their application seriously. Now I welcome them. I appreciate errors in writing as a sign of personal engagement and care in an essay. Don’t believe me? Read on.
No admissions officer who is reviewing application essays and is putting together a class wants to feel like they’re reading the words prepared by an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT. Not only can it be insulting, it may also break the school’s AI policies, and above all, it’s typically boring! While AI may tell a story logically and seamlessly, the result is often an essay devoid of humanity and soul.
There are a few telltale signs: the perfect grammar, spelling, and, ahem, em dashes (—). For the more nuanced reader, it can be a very consistent sentence and paragraph structure. I tend to notice the AI author or editor when I’ve read a sentence or paragraph and haven’t retained a thing.
Five reasons why using AI on an application essay can hurt you more than help you:
AI interferes with an application reader's ability to get to know a student. AI-written essays lack personality, warmth, and what we call “voice”. It’s the quirks of personality and perspective that allow us to feel we understand a person. When that disappears, the essay could have been written by anyone, and the possibility for human connection vanishes.
AI can’t draw upon your nuanced experiences, especially those from your extracurricular activities and interests. Applicants can spend years engaging in activities (athletics, service, arts, clubs), hoping to impress a school with their commitment and engagement, thus improving their candidacy. Then, as the applicant completes the application activity form, those activities are reduced to a single line. The hours committed, miles driven, time sacrificed, and the sweat, tears, glory, and lessons learned disappear. Application essays can be a chance to bring the human elements to life. The conflict, tension, and sweet rewards can never be conveyed by the bot; it relies on generalized experiences, and suddenly your deeply personal experience reads cleanly, but tells a clichéd story. As awkward as it may feel to put your experiences into words, your specific experience brings your story to life. Your application reader reads thousands of stories about soccer championships, coming back from baseball injuries, sticking with piano, relationships with grandparents, cooking with your father, and the challenging canoeing trip. They know them all; they want to know about the specifics of YOUR experience–and the details only you can add.
AI conceals a student’s true writing ability. I know that a writer may be eager to make themselves look like a better writer than they are (who doesn’t?), and this is why applicants are given time to draft, write, and revise. But admission offices expect essays to be an authentic reflection of a student’s writing ability. Application essays are often compared to SSAT writing samples, writing samples administered during school visits, student interviews, or how English teachers' recommendations describe student writers. When the application essays and other data don’t align, suspicions about a heavy-handed adult editor/writer or AI emerge. And when an application reader suspects that an essay has been written by AI, they simply discard the essay. The application reader loses trust in the applicant, and the applicant is no longer considered a viable candidate. There goes all the time spent researching the school, visiting, interviewing, writing application essays, all for an essay that's marginally better.
Your imperfect essay, in your voice, is still better than an AI-written essay. The admissions committee would much rather read your meandering essay, with misplaced commas and disagreeing subject-verbs, that they can tell was written by the person they interviewed, than the grammatically perfect essays that don't sound like an 8th grader. If they can’t find you in the essay, then it’s not doing the job. With the advent of AI, when it comes to application essays at the middle and high school level, grammatical errors are the mark of a student writer. AI has inspired most readers of application essays to better appreciate wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection and flaws.
Application essays can also be a trust-building exercise. While essays can feel like an unwanted homework assignment at a time when one is already very busy, there is an implicit trust requested in an application essay, and trust is built when an essay is successfully written. Long before AI, the possibility of cheating always existed when submitting an application essay. A school asks an applicant’s opinion or experience with something and asks that they use their own words to earnestly, thoughtfully, and honestly respond. When a student submits a thoughtful and reflective essay, they are fulfilling their side of the request and asking that, in turn, their words will be treated with respect and consideration. Schools also ask for a word count for the essays, and meeting the word count shows students' willingness to adhere to the school’s expectations. When either side of that agreement is broken: by the student using someone's (or something else’s) words or by the school not treating the application with respect, the bond or trust is broken. At the bottom of the application, schools generally ask students to sign a statement confirming that the application is their own words. Now, some schools are introducing their applications with the statement that the use of AI is forbidden, so if a student uses AI, they are breaking a school rule in the application process. That’s not how you want to start any relationship.
AI can unintentionally change your intended meaning. AI is not in your head, and as it edits your writing, it can make suggestions that seem logical on the surface but subtly shift your narrative. The unexpected turns, contradictions, and hard-won lessons that make your story memorable are precisely what AI is likely to smooth over.
Even if all of your ideas are your own, if you use AI to refine and polish your essays, you can still undermine your credibility. Obviously AI writing assistance can come in many forms ranging from idea generation and revisions from a chat bot like Chat GPT or Claude to minor edits from Grammarly. Even if you just wait until the end of the process and just paste your essay into a chat bot for final revisions, if all of your grammar is fixed and some sentences are rewritten, your essay will likely be given the smooth veneer of AI. Even if it was only the final step after investing hours, days, even months to perfect it, your essay could still be discarded. And the problem is that it doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t use AI; whether your entire essay was AI generated, or only used for final editing. If a reader even suspects that AI was involved, you’ve lost. They don’t need to put your essay through an AI detector. Suspicion has undermined your reliability and trust with your reader.
What about using AI to generate essay ideas?
AI is great at predicting what people want to hear and thinks squarely within the box,. The best essays are not predictable and capture something special about you. This is stuff that only you can come up with. Only you know about your passion for writing handwritten notes, why you love JD Salinger’s Nine Stories, how your grandmother’s immigration story has shaped your family, that your family has fostered six cats, or that you collect CDs, and love 90s Grunge Rock. When these details are incorporated into essays and short answers, they bring you to life and make the application reader excited to get to know you better.
Two exceptions – for adult writers!
There are always exceptions to any good rule. I am far more comfortable with adults (i.e., parents and guardians) using AI, such as Grammarly or an LLM, in an admissions process than students. Tthe important distinction is that parents are not applying to be a student in a community. That said, be mindful that your voice is not lost — for all of the above reasons.
AI can be helpful for adults for whom English is their second (or more) language to help them organize their ideas and articulate them. However, I always recommend that you ask AI to maintain your voice and identify grammatical errors when you are unclear. I also rec that AI highlight the suggestions so you can make the changes yourself. (And this way you can keep learning as a writer, too!) Again, try to preserve as much of your own voice and perspective as possible. Just like with students, when you disappear from an essay, an application reader often fails to connect with you.
AI can be helpful when an adult has a difficult situation to explain, and you need to figure out how to articulate it delicately. Parents often struggle with how to articulate issues with student discipline, mental or physical health, prolonged absences, a mismatch between a student and a teacher or a school, or their own marital or familial struggles. In these cases, AI can help find a diplomatic approach. I still recommend that you ultimately put everything into your own words, but AI can be a very good starting point.
The quickest way to tank an application is to allow AI to replace an applicant’s voice and perspective. Pragmatically, AI interferes with an admission officer’s ability to get to know you; ethically, it undermines the integrity of the relationship you’re trying to form with a school.
The bottom line: Quite fortunately, an admission team’s task of building and selecting a class is still a very human endeavor, and schools want to know you. They are forgiving and understanding of human errors and know what is reasonable to expect from a student or parent. The minute you put a bot between an admissions office and yourself, you undermine the possibility for human connection, and that is exactly what schools are looking for as they select a class. Admissions officers want to understand you, what motivates you, what you’re working on, and what you’ll be like as a member of their community. With every admit, they are taking a chance on your integrity, your commitment, and your character. What matters far more than a series of glossy essays is that you — and all of your flaws — shine through. AI is a tempting tool to ease the pain of application essay writing. But my advice — and that of every admissions officer I have spoken to on the subject — is to take the longer and more arduous route, as imperfect as it may be, so that schools can get to know the real you.
Spruce Advisors is an educational consultancy supporting families applying to preschool–high school in the Bay Area and boarding schools across North America, helping them find the right school for their child.
