AI may be scoring your college essay. Welcome to the new era of admissions

Students applying to college know that they can’t — or at least shouldn’t — use AI chatbots to write their essays and personal statements. So it might come as a surprise that some schools are now using artificial intelligence to read them.

AI tools are now integrated into the way student applications are screened and analyzed, admissions directors say. It can be a touchy subject, and not all universities are eager to talk about it, but higher education is one of many sectors where artificial intelligence is rapidly taking over tasks once reserved for humans.

In some cases, schools are quietly integrating AI into their assessment process, experts say. Others tout the technology’s potential to speed up application review, reduce processing times and even perform certain tasks better than humans.

“Humans get tired; some days are better than others. AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t get cranky. It doesn’t have a bad day. AI is consistent,” says Juan Espinoza, vice provost for enrollment management at Virginia Tech.

This fall, Virginia Tech is launching an AI-powered essay reader. The college hopes to be able to notify students of admissions decisions a month earlier than usual, in late January, with the tool’s help in sorting through tens of thousands of applications.

Colleges emphasize that they do not rely on AI to make admissions decisions, but use it primarily to review transcripts and eliminate data entry tasks. But artificial intelligence also plays a role in student assessment. Some highly selective schools are adopting AI tools to review the increasingly vetted application packages that some students develop with the help of expensive admissions consultants.

The California Institute of Technology is launching an AI tool this fall to screen for “authenticity” in students who submit research projects with their applications, said admissions director Ashley Pallie. Students upload their research to an AI chatbot that asks them about it on video, which is then reviewed by Caltech professors.

“It’s a mark of authenticity. Can you claim this research intellectually? Is there a level of joy around your project? That passion is important to us,” Pallie said.

The prevalence of AI use is difficult to gauge because it is a very new trend, said Ruby Bhattacharya, chair of the admissions practices committee at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. NACAC updated its ethics guide this fall to add a section on artificial intelligence. It urges colleges to ensure that how they use it “is consistent with our shared values ​​of transparency, integrity, fairness and respect for the dignity of students.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faced an avalanche of negative feedback from applicants, parents and students after its student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, reported in January that the school was using AI to evaluate the grammar and writing style of applicants’ essays.

The university declined to comment for this article and pointed to its admissions website, which it updated after the criticism. “UNC uses AI programs to provide data points on students’ common essay and transcripts,” the website states. Each application “is comprehensively evaluated by highly trained human application evaluators.”

At Virginia Tech, Espinoza said he was contacted by several colleges interested in the new technology but wary of negative reactions. “The feedback from many colleagues is: ‘You deploy this, we’ll monitor you and we’ll see how everyone reacts,’” he said.

He emphasized that the AI ​​reader his school spent three years developing is only used to confirm the scores of human readers.

Until this fall, each of the four short-answer essays submitted by Virginia Tech applicants was read and graded by two people. Under the new system, one of those readers is the AI ​​model, which was trained from past applicants’ essays and the scoring rubric, Espinoza said.

A second person will step in if the AI ​​and human reader disagree by more than two points on a 12-point rating scale.

Like many colleges, Virginia Tech has seen a huge increase in applications since the SATs became optional. Last year, it received a record 57,622 applications for its 7,000-seat freshman class. Even with 200 essay readers, the school struggled to keep up and found itself informing students later and later.

The AI ​​tool can scan around 250,000 essays in less than an hour, compared to a human reader who takes an average of two minutes per essay. Based on last year’s pool of applicants, “we’re saving at least 8,000 hours,” Espinoza said.

The message is sensitive for universities, many of which now require students to attest that they have not used AI unethically for essays and other parts of the application. But schools say AI tools can help admissions offices eliminate errors in tasks like uploading transcripts and simplify the process for students.

Georgia Tech is rolling out an AI tool this fall to review transfer students’ college transcripts, replacing the need for staff to manually enter each course into a database. This will allow the school to more quickly notify applicants of the number of transfer credits they will receive, reducing uncertainty and wait times, said Richard Clark, the school’s executive director of enrollment management.

“It’s an added layer of delay, stress and inevitable errors. AI is going to kill that, which I’m so excited about,” Clark said. The school hopes to soon expand this service to all high school transcripts. Georgia Tech is also testing AI tools for other uses, including one that would help identify low-income students who are eligible for federal Pell Grants but may not have realized it.

Stony Brook University in New York also uses artificial intelligence to review applicants’ transcripts and test AI tools for various tasks, such as summarizing student essays and letters of recommendation to highlight elements an admissions officer should consider, said Richard Beatty, the school’s senior associate dean for enrollment management.

“Maybe a student was battling an illness as a sophomore. Or maybe a parent passed away, or they’re caring for their siblings at home. All of those things matter, and it allows counselors to look at the transcript differently,” Beatty said.

Colleges are interested in AI summaries of transcripts, extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation that tell human readers the students’ story in a more digestible way, said Emily Pacheco, founder of NACAC’s AI and Admissions Special Interest Group.

“Humans and AI working together — that’s the key right now. Every step of the process can be greatly improved: reading transcripts, reviewing essays, telling us things we might miss about students,” said Pacheco, former assistant director of admissions at Loyola University Chicago. “Ten years from now, all bets are off. I guess AI will admit students.”

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