Everyone must admit one thing. Compared with ChatGPT, the articles produced by most applicants are of higher quality——
· ChatGPT language is more accurate
· ChatGPT article structure is more rigorous
· ChatGPT writing is smoother
……
But why is it still not recommended that everyone use artificial intelligence to write application documents?
Essays matter—much more than most students realize. Because college admissions offices use essays to distinguish between tens of thousands of applicants with similar academic backgrounds .
The applicant's goal is not to write a better essay than "many" (or even most) applicants; the applicant's goal should be to write a better essay than almost all other applicants .
Below, we take the document written by ChatGPT as an example to explain why artificial intelligence is not currently replaceable. We will also show you some techniques on how to use ChatGPT to optimize the papers you write.
● ChatGPT document example
First, we enter some commands -
Generally speaking, the more details provided
The higher the quality of ChatGPT’s output
Then take a look at what kind of documents ChatGPT constructs——
At first glance, this seems like a good article. The language is easy to understand, and the writing is smooth and engaging.
But upon closer inspection, this article falls short.
Poor content -
"Those experiences taught me a lot about myself and others. In Mexico, I learned the tremendous power of patience and persistence."
This sounds great, but it doesn’t provide college admissions officers with enough depth to understand the applicant. They don’t want to hear what the applicant has learned, they want the applicant to show it .
● Why ChatGPT documentation is insufficient
Let’s dig into why and how this AI-written article might fail you.
01. The applicant’s personality must be outstanding
Your "voice" is an important part of your application essay, and you should tell the most persuasive story about your experiences that demonstrate your success in college and beyond.
Admissions officers will use your essay to understand whether you can become a member of the campus and community. They can't do this if they don't understand your personality and way of thinking.
ChatGPT's voice is not your voice. As we said, it's a mix of all the examples of "good" college essays on the internet . You may think that ChatGPT’s articles sound good, but this is not you. Admissions officers who have read countless articles are likely to find that——
Admissions officers read a large number of applications, often more than 50 a day. While ChatGPT is new during the latest application season, admissions officers will soon learn to identify which essays were written by artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT’s voice is evident. Some schools even use artificial intelligence checkers like CopyLeaks, which, while not perfect, does a decent job of detecting ChatGPT.
You might think you can outsmart the admissions officers by revising what the AI wrote. But this won't work, and your article may end up cluttered because your "voice" is mixed with ChatGPT's "voice."
Keep in mind that admissions officers spend an average of 8 minutes reading each application. They don’t have time to read carefully and think about whether it was written by an artificial intelligence. If they suspect an application may have been written by artificial intelligence, they are more likely to reject it and move on to the next one.
If we apply this to the articles written by ChatGPT, please note that most of the weak phrases we highlighted above also have a special "ChatGPT voice" when read.
Because the content produced by artificial intelligence is not constructed in the way normal people write - especially not the way high school students write. But that's how ChatGPT writes - it uses the same voice in all its articles. This is easily recognized by admissions officers and their artificial intelligence detection tools.
02.ChatGPT does not understand the “needs” of admissions officers
ChatGPT is still a long way from AGI (artificial general intelligence, able to think like us humans).
According to computer scientist Cal Newport, ChatGPT is basically "trained on passages extracted from a large corpus of sample text, including much of the public web." It generates query answers using a "word voting strategy" that predicts the most common words following a specific phrase.
In other words, ChatGPT can only write papers based on online content .
So, do you think most essays on the Internet are excellent? Or are most of them bad? The correct answer is: Most are terrible. However, these dregs are what ChatGPT will "learn" , and ChatGPT cannot distinguish which content is not good enough .
Additionally, ChatGPT is not aware of college admissions office requirements for applicant essays. The articles he generated were consistent with what he found online.
In fact, competitive colleges want applicants to demonstrate their likelihood of success in college and beyond . Specifically, they want applicants whose experiences reflect a number of traits that colleges value: drive, intellectual curiosity, initiative, contribution, and diversity of experiences/interests . They want to see that the applicant has done something that others cannot do (or do poorly).
● How to use ChatGPT correctly
When it comes to college application essay writing, ChatGPT is not without its merits. Here are 3 ways to make ChatGPT more useful:
01. Use AI for brainstorming
We've figured out how to have ChatGPT provide question clues to help you write more engaging content. But be aware that ChatGPT doesn't know exactly what colleges are looking for in their essays.
Therefore, you need to include such content in the instructions (Prompt) you provide, for example: ask him to use the "5 Traits Colleges Look for in Essays" to guide you (use the 5 Traits Colleges Look for in Essays) to guide you).
02. Provide feedback on the content and structure of the draft
You can give ChatGPT a draft of your work and ask for feedback on how to make it better. It’s important to add clear questions you want it to answer, such as: “What did you not learn that you wanted to learn?
But again, note that adding relevant content (such as 5 traits) to the directive will help ChatGPT provide better feedback. You can even request a sample outline from ChatGPT so you can restructure your article to make it more persuasive.
03. Reduce the document to the specified number of words
Many applicants have too much to say when writing their essays, and it is difficult to reduce the content of the essay to the specified number of words.
ChatGPT can help – again, with the right instructions.
If you ask ChatGPT to make a draft of your document more concise, he will rewrite the content substantially (and even change the tone) - not a good choice.
Setting a word count target for ChatGPT also doesn't work because ChatGPT doesn't have a good idea of word count. However, using "minimally edit" language in your instructions does a good job of identifying words and phrases that you can cut out without having to do too much rewriting .
This works especially well if you also indicate specific things you want ChatGPT to pay attention to when editing, such as removing unnecessary details or prepositional phrases .
You can then feed ChatGPT's output into a document comparison tool (Google Docs, Word) to see what edits ChatGPT has made (ChatGPT is not good at comparing documents), and you can decide which edits to use, not use, or modify. .
Although the application situation this year will be greatly affected by the emergence of ChatGPT, current AI technology cannot replace experienced planning teachers.
The personal characteristics of the applicant are very important, so you should not focus too much on tools to the exclusion of self and personality.