Ban or embrace? Colleges wrestle with AI-generated admissions essays

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

artificial intelligence chatbots to fill out college applications.

The admissions officers each took on a different high school persona: swim team captain, Eagle Scout, musical theater performer. Then they fed personal details about the fictional students into ChatGPT, prompting the AI chatbot to produce the kind of extracurricular activity lists and personal essays commonly required on college applications.

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Clark said he wanted to get a handle on how AI chatbots might reshape the admissions process this fall — the start of the first full academic year that the tools will be widely available to high school seniors — and come up with guidance for students applying to Georgia Tech.

«Students on some level are going to have access to and use AI,» Clark said. «The big question is: How do we want to direct them, knowing that it's out there and available to them?»

The easy availability of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which can manufacture humanlike text in response to short prompts, is poised to upend the traditional undergraduate application process at selective colleges — ushering in an era of automated plagiarism or of democratized student access to essay-writing help. Or maybe both.

The digital disruption comes at a turning point for institutions of higher education across the United States. After the Supreme Court in June ruled that race-based university admissions programs were illegal, some