College Essays Were Always Bad—ChatGPT Makes Them Worse
Alleyway in Osaka, Japan
Most college applications are not very good
One of the only blogs or Reddit posts I’ve made that went viral was titled “Most college applications are not very good.” That bold claim might be a surprise since you only see exceptional examples posted on admissions blogs or social media. Even so, many essays featured on blogs are full of cliché and hyperbole and aren’t particularly good.
The reality is that most application submissions everywhere are not very good.
Even academically perfect students with stellar resumes who attend the nation’s top high schools submit crappy essays. Many still manage to gain admission despite bad writing. Now that I’ve worked for over a decade assisting families, it’s obvious to me that most students submit their first draft effort because the sort of initial writing my clients send to me looks a lot like what I used to read at UT.
Essay requirements in holistic review aren’t reliable indicators of anything
One problem with holistic review as a tool for assessing talent and character is that mostly mediocre essays aren’t useful indicators for much of anything. One thing I often wonder is to imagine the number of books admissions professionals could read or write if not for the hundreds of millions of crappy essays they review each year. I also question that in the age of AI, now much of what students submit isn’t even human-made, adding to the wasted time.
I know most essays aren’t very good because I used to read them when I was an admissions counselor for UT-Austin. I worked in an era when people still asked, “Do they really read all the essays?”
Yes. We read every essay, our sanity be damned.
Perhaps a dozen out of 2,000 essays were worth sharing with colleagues. Maybe another hundred wouldn’t embarrass the applicant if they reread them years later. The remaining 90 percent of submissions ranged from unremarkable to downright awful, including my own shoddy, last-minute UT application essays that students later claim on Reddit or TikTok that “got me into UT honors” or whichever top university. The reality is most students gain admission to university despite their crappy essays.
If most essays aren’t very good, why do they play such a prominent role? The gatekeepers’ gospel leads us to believe that the college essay is an essential tool in deciding each applicant’s fate.
Admissions offices claim that essays allow students to provide context to their transcript and resume; supply background information about their home environment; share about their identity; and discuss their ambitions and dreams, or anything else not easily quantifiable. Admissions readers claim to “get to know” their applicants, never mind that few essays are read closely. They’re certainly not being critiqued and red-penciled like an AP English Literature assignment. Entire applications are usually skimmed in less than ten minutes.
Selective universities like UT claim that essays are necessary to separate a crowded applicant pool of the academically perfect and extracurricularly outstanding. In a 2019 National Association of College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) survey of 220 universities, 24 percent rated essays are of “considerable importance,” second only to a student’s transcript and standardized test scores.
Most admissions professionals share my observation
The most popular online community for students applying to and discussing college admissions is Reddit’s Applying to College (A2C), with over a million members. Whenever topics around essay quality arise, current and former admissions counselors chime in with universal agreement that most applications aren’t very good. So, this isn’t just my opinion. Then, on Reddit’s College Results or other admissions communities, admitted students love to self-report their essays as 8 or 9/10. This is called the better-than-average fallacy/placement bias since none of them has a reference point of what an average college essay looks like.
Almost all students assume their essays are much better than other applicants. Statistically speaking, half of all applicants must be below average. There is a sub-genre for beating the college essay that clocks in at over 4,000 books on Amazon because doing even a bit better than the median mediocre can give you an edge. College essays are arguably the highest-stakes writing assignments the applicant will ever complete, which command high consulting fees from people like me. Independent undergraduate admissions consultants may be the world's highest-paid copyeditors and writing coaches.
Applicants apply to substantially more universities today
According to the governing body NACAC, applicants nowadays almost three times as many applications compared with 1990. Rising application loads mean more essay submissions. It’s not unheard of for some applicants to submit upward of 50 essays for their varied admissions, honors, and scholarship applications. Students who apply for nationwide universities likely work anywhere from 100 to 200 hours, if not more, on their applications, not accounting for distractions. Time pressures nudge students to use AI and ChatGPT as a low-quality shortcut that might not actually save them any time.
ChatGPT produces inferior college essays
Now, in the age of ChatGPT and Generative AI, college essays are undoubtedly even worse.
ChatGPT outputs for college admissions are always generic, impersonal, abstract, awkward, and counterproductive. They sound pretty, yet they communicate little. There is no shortcut for putting in the time and energy to produce quality submissions. Even with endless prompt engineering, AI might get you a top 10 or 20% essay, but never an outstanding one. Writing and rewriting a few drafts and moderate editing of entirely human-generated content could also produce a top 10% essay, since most applicants submit their first rough draft effort.
Since most students and people generally don’t know how to write, they also don’t know how to use AI tools. You’re not fooling your teachers or admissions reviewers when you use AI - the stakes are often too high to risk a false positive by calling you out.
One way to stand out from the admissions crowd is not to use AI.
During the Fall 2024, my clients attempted to use AI for the first time. Since I look at teenage writing all day every day, I can detect it immediately. ZeroGPT and other AI checkers are accurate enough that they almost always agree with my intuition. Your admissions reviewers will almost certainly have an intuition when you use AI since it looks and feels a little off, especially relative to human-written college essays.
One tech commenter called this intuition the “uncanny valley:”
“The Uncanny Valley in writing manifests when AI-generated content approaches but fails to fully achieve human-like expression. This evokes a sense of unease, discomfort and perhaps disgust in readers.... When we encounter AI-generated writing that mimics human expression but falls short, it feels wrong. It can feel like an unsettling breach of the unspoken rules that govern our communication. These aren’t just technical rules about grammar and syntax; they’re the subtle norms that dictate how we convey meaning, emotion, and intent. Those rules are held quite close to our hearts, so having them violated is really challenging.”
One of my transfer clients, who admitted to relying entirely on AI to get through college, shared that they were self-aware of brain rot. Here is a recent Cold Fusion video making the same argument. They’re unable to think for themselves or communicate original ideas. They described it as if wires weren’t connecting basic parts of their minds.
A quote attributed to George Orwell observed that if you can no longer think and write, others will do your thinking for you.
ChatGPT/Generative AI amplify analysis paralysis
Overediting and application submission paralysis are also huge problems. Students wait days or weeks to submit their applications. So, what ends up happening is that a student has five different versions of an essay, but can’t assess the quality and know what to submit. Another flaw with ChatGPT is that it can’t (yet) tell you the process behind its outputs, so whatever feedback it offers will always be inconsistent, inaccurate, and unhelpful. Current models also cannot share whether it knows something to be true or not.
College essays have always been bad, and part of me wonders when and to what degree AI will automate holistic review and college admissions in general. The college essay may disappear someday. For now, though, universities, honors programs, summer programs, and scholarships require even more essays than ever before. It doesn’t seem like the college essay is going anywhere anytime soon. I take pity on the counselors who have to read endless AI slop.
College applications have always been gigantic time sucks
Let me leave you with a final thought. While writing my Surviving the College Admissions Madness (2021), I read an interesting article from 1965. A high school admissions counselor, Fred Crossland, makes the same point as this post:
“Because of our collective failures in both secondary and higher education, we have come close to making access to our colleges and universities a shambles (sic). For tens of thousands of our young people, we have made college admissions a traumatic experience. We may have seriously damaged the senior year in high school. We have created unnecessary tensions. We have been wasteful of our national human resources… [There are] millions of dollars are wasted on application fees… millions of man-hours are wasted on recruitment… millions of anxious student-hours are wasted on unnecessary and redundant testing and filling out of forms; that precious time should be spent in learning and experiencing the joys of intellectual growth.”
At least in the 1960s applicants were presumably doing their own work. Nowadays, it’s impossible to know how universities make decisions or whether application submissions come from humans.
The easiest way to reach me is by email kevin@texadmissions.com