Can College Applicants/Students Use AI?
November 1, 2024
Can College Applicants & Students Use AI? There’s a short answer and a long answer to this question. If you’ve come to this article wondering if you can use ChatGPT or some other AI software to write your college admissions essays or essays for a college course, you likely already know the answer to that question. The very short answer is obviously: no.
We’ll get more into plagiarism a bit later in this post, but suffice it to say: passing the work of another person or, in this case, a machine, off as your own falls under the guidelines of academic dishonesty at just about every school, college, and university I can think of. And, many times, when students violate codes of academic dishonesty, they can face serious consequences, including eventual expulsion.
Let’s be clear: taking your essay prompt to ChatGPT and telling it to write your essay for you is not the move. Doing it repeatedly could even get you expelled.
So, what’s the longer answer? Buckle up. There’s a slightly more holistic reason why you shouldn’t even want to use generative AI to write your essays for you. It has to do with the value of learning.
Can College Students Use AI (Continued)?
Let’s imagine that you’re a student in a college class, and you have been assigned an essay to write about The Industrial Revolution or The Case for Reparations or the first memory you had as a child. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. The point is that you—your brain and your personal capacity—have been assigned the assignment.
And what’s the point of being assigned such a task, this task of writing an essay? Well, the idea is to help you learn. The very reason that you’re (ostensibly) going to college in the first place, right?
The fact remains: when you don’t do the work, you don’t get the benefits. This might sting especially badly if you’re paying to go to school, taking out loans to do so, or simply, value succeeding after graduation. If you’re skirting your assignments, what will you learn?
You will, undoubtedly, help to teach whatever artificial language model you’re using how to write an essay for the prompt you feed it. And that will be great for that AI model and whatever multi billion dollar conglomerate that runs the AI. But ultimately, you’ll be on the losing end. Because what you will have taught yourself in this moment, in the moment when your patience, your desire, your willingness, and your capacity run out, is that it’s okay to pass the work of someone or something off as your own.
Can College Students Use AI (Continued)?
This is the lesson of all plagiarism: that you do not value yourself or your brain or your learning experience enough to try really hard—and even potentially fail—when you’ve been given a task.
What you teach yourself when you use AI to write for you is that you are inadequate.
So, my best advice is not to use ChapGPT or Grammarly or Cramly to write your admissions or coursework essays.
That is, of course, if your goal in pursuing an education is to learn.
Problems with AI
And then, of course, there are the horrors.
You might be thinking to yourself, “Sure, but claims about plagiarism only really matter if I get caught.”
And that might be true. Perhaps you could “get away with” passing off an AI-generated essay as your own. But, I would argue, there are far more interesting things to consider than simply getting caught. (And they actually tell us some fascinating things about how these generative machines work in general.)
Ethan Mollick is the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. He is also Co-Director of Generative AI Labs at Wharton and the author of the book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.
In an interview with Knowledge at Wharton, Mollick said that the best way to work with AI is to treat it like a person, however, “you have to remember you are dealing with a software process.”
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Asking a generative AI interface to write an essay for you can result in some pretty funky outcomes.
In a conversation with TED’s Allie Miller, Mollick admitted: “Accuracy is a problem.”
Mollick asked an AI model to come up with some research, and the model generated “four fake citations.”
“I asked my class, how many of these do you think they’re real? Everyone thinks all of them are real. They have URLs that look correct and you click on them and they’re just nonsense. Or they go somewhere to a different article, right?”
He went on to say that AI not only “lies,” but it “lies convincingly, which is more worrying than it lying.” Because professors do have to know enough to check your sources, especially if you ask generative AI to write you an entire research paper. And sure, you might think you can pass that by your profs, but it might not be as easy as you think.
Can College Students Use AI (Continued)?
Mollick continued to say that AI “hallucinates. I asked it to conduct an interview between your radio competitor, Terry Gross, and George Washington. And the system said, ‘I can’t do that because George Washington died in 1793.’ I said, ‘Yes, but George Washington has a time machine.’ And it was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And spat out an entire interview between Terry Gross and George Washington. So there is a lot of really weird stuff going on, right?”
So, if you ask AI to help you write a paper, it might produce things for you that absolutely do not and cannot exist—and that, unfortunately, is something your professors and TAs will absolutely be able to pick up on. All it really takes is one loose thread, and your entire AI-written essay can unravel.
Besides, your professors and college admissions officers want to see your interest in a given subject or in their university. Your experiences and interests are much more unique than the learned behaviors of a machine.
Using AI to “help” with an essay
Okay, so, maybe I’ve convinced you that using generative AI to fully write an essay is not a great idea.
But you’re tired, you don’t have time, you stopped caring, and you just need to turn something in. Can AI at least help with your essay?
I decided to check out Harvard’s AI-use policy to see what the top tier Ivy Leaguers are telling their students. Here’s the tea. Harvard students are encouraged to experiment with AI, but they still have to adhere to university and course guidelines requiring the submission of their own work. If your professor or department says that generative AI passed off as your own work is plagiarism, again, you’re up against steep consequences.
Can College Students Use AI (Continued)?
Harvard also notes the problems with accuracy, stating, “A good rule of thumb is to retain a healthy skepticism and understand that these tools can and frequently do get things wrong. AI-generated content can be inaccurate, misleading, or entirely fabricated (sometimes called “hallucinations”). A chatbot can provide a confident-sounding, plausible response to a question that is nonetheless completely false or significantly distorted. Always verify the accuracy of AI-generated output.”
They then list some ways in which generative AI can actually augment your learning. That’s what we’re all here to do, right? So, if you’re really in a pinch and thinking of using AI, Harvard suggests you consider the ways the machines can assist you without plagiarizing:
Do College Admissions Officers Check for AI? (Continued)
- Generating or debugging code
- Creating spreadsheet formulas
- Searching
- Summarizing documents
- Synthesizing information, including survey responses
- Translating
- Reviewing or enhancing your work
- Boosting productivity
- Improving accessibility
So, it’s definitely possible to get some help from generative AI, but again, you have to stay skeptical of what you get.
AI and Plagiarism
Let’s turn back to the idea of plagiarism. Lots of schools are actively working to find ways to work with AI as a part of the new normal, but again, professors and admissions experts want to know that you’re doing the work.
The University of Iowa Libraries have compiled language from university syllabi across the country. This language includes examples indicating how students may use AI in the classroom. Take a look at these examples:
When AI is prohibited
[This course] assumes that work submitted by students—all process work, drafts, low-stakes writing, final versions, and all other submissions—will be generated by the students themselves, working individually or in groups. This means that the following would be considered violations of academic integrity: a student has another person/entity do the writing of any substantive portion of an assignment for them, which includes hiring a person or a company to write essays and drafts and/or other assignments, research-based or otherwise, and using artificial intelligence affordances like ChatGPT.
When AI is allowed with attribution
In all academic work, the ideas and contributions of others must be appropriately acknowledged and work that is presented as original must be, in fact, original. Using an AI-content generator (such as ChatGPT) to complete coursework without proper attribution or authorization is a form of academic dishonesty. If you are unsure about whether something may be plagiarism or academic dishonesty, please contact your instructor to discuss the issue. Faculty, students, and administrative staff all share the responsibility of ensuring the honesty and fairness of the intellectual environment. (Excerpted from Constructing a Syllabus: A Checklist by Washington University in St. Louis Center for Teaching and Learning)
Do College Admissions Officers Check for AI? (Continued)
When AI is allowed with attribution
Use of AI tools, including ChatGPT, is permitted in this course for students who wish to use them. To be consistent with our scholarly values, students must cite any AI-generated material that informed their work and use quotation marks or other appropriate indicators of quoted material when appropriate. Students should indicate how AI tools informed their process and the final product, including how you validated any AI-generated citations, which may be invented by the AI. Assignment guidelines will provide additional guidance as to how these tools might be part of your process for each assessment this semester and how to provide transparency about their use in your work.
When AI use is encouraged with certain tasks
Students are invited to use AI platforms to help prepare for assignments and projects (e.g., to help with brainstorming or to see what a completed essay might look like). I also welcome you to use AI tools to help revise and edit your work (e.g., to help identify flaws in reasoning, spot confusing or underdeveloped paragraphs, or to simply fix citations). When submitting work, students must clearly identify any writing, text, or media generated by AI. This can be done in a variety of ways. In this course, parts of essays generated by AI should appear in a different colored font, and the relationship between those sections and student contributions should be discussed in cover letters that accompany the essay submission. (Based on Course Policies related to ChatGPT and other AI Tools by Joel Gladd)”
What’s interesting here is that, in fact, some professors are choosing to allow students to use generative AI in their classrooms—and they’re making the rules of that use explicit in their course syllabi. The other thing you’ll note is that all of these uses are in line with what we’ve talked about above: AI use has to be in line with course and university guidelines.
Do College Admissions Officers Check for AI? (Continued)
Let’s contrast those statements with the Academic Honesty and Plagiarism policy from a completely different school, The University of Chicago. Their policy states:
“It is contrary to justice, academic integrity, and to the spirit of intellectual inquiry to submit another’s statements or ideas as one’s own work. To do so is plagiarism or cheating, offenses punishable under the University’s disciplinary system. Because these offenses undercut the distinctive moral and intellectual character of the University, we take them very seriously.
Do College Admissions Officers Check for AI? (Continued)
Proper acknowledgment of another’s ideas, whether by direct quotation or paraphrase, is expected. In particular, if any written or electronic source is consulted and material is used from that source, directly or indirectly, the source should be identified by author, title, and page number, or by website and date accessed. Any doubts about what constitutes “use” should be addressed to the instructor.”
You can see that, even across several different universities nationwide, there really is the expectation that you are honest about where your work comes from—and that you are well aware of what your professors require or what the college admissions requirements are.
This is all to say, again, that if you have any doubt about what you’re doing, contact your professor. If you know you’re passing off AI work as your own and you shouldn’t. You’re better off just asking for an extension. You could even ask ChatGPT to draft that email for you. How easy was that?
Can College Students Use AI? – Additional Resources
