How AI Will Make Your College Applications Forgettable
AI can make a student’s college application forgettable by replacing the specific details, surprising connections, and uneven human phrasing that reveal how a student thinks with language that is polished but statistically familiar. Even when an AI-assisted essay sounds more sophisticated, it may make the student resemble other applicants at the exact moment they need their writing to make their profile more memorable.
That is the central argument of our two-part podcast conversation on It Depends: College Admissions Advice by Principia Education. Students usually ask whether colleges can detect AI, but we think the more important question is what AI removes from a student’s essay beyond just the erasure of their writing style and voice.
In an early post, we covered the news that, after 133 years of unproctored examinations, Princeton voted to require proctors for in-person exams. The faculty committee cited growing concern about cheating and noted that AI on small personal devices is difficult for other students to observe and report. Repeatedly handing over brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing can keep students from developing the thinking muscles that college will require. And in an application, those shortcuts often erase the very evidence of mind and character that colleges are trying to find.
For a broader discussion of college policies and appropriate uses, see our earlier article, Should You Use AI in Your College Admissions Process? This podcast highlight focuses on the next question: why does AI make an application less memorable, and what should a student do instead?
Why does AI make college essays sound alike?
AI makes college essays sound alike because a large language model generates probable language from patterns in existing text. That can produce fluent sentences quickly, but fluency is not the same as originality. The model is especially good at moving toward an answer that seems broadly reasonable, appropriate, and complete. College essays often become memorable by doing something less predictable.
A study comparing real essays from 30,000 applicants with LLM-generated admissions essays found that the synthetic essays were linguistically distinct from human essays and more similar to one another. Adding demographic information to the prompts did not eliminate that homogenization. In other words, telling the model more about an applicant did not reliably make the output sound like that applicant’s human peer group.
A separate preprint examining more than 370,000 admissions essays before and after ChatGPT reported a related tradeoff: post-ChatGPT essays showed greater lexical diversity but deeper conceptual homogenization. The sentences may use more varied vocabulary while the ideas move closer together.
Put simply, AI can make an essay sound fancier at the sentence level while making it less original at the idea level.
How does AI flatten the emotional heart of an essay?
AI often edits toward a clean summary of emotion instead of preserving the exact thought that gives the emotion its force. Consider two versions of a student’s reflection on learning Bengali after feeling disconnected from her family’s language.
Student’s original: “What type of parent would purposely disconnect their culture from their child?”
AI-trimmed version: “At first, her response hurt. I interpreted it as indifference, even rejection.”
The AI version is shorter, calmer, and far less revealing. The original question shows a flawed, judgmental initial reaction that the student later complicates. Her eventual maturity feels honest and real because we first saw the sharper belief she had to outgrow. The edit shrank the emotional heart of the student’s essay.
This happens a lot when students use AI to trim their essays as they repurpose topics for different supplemental essays. But a human editor doesn’t just cut words willy-nilly; when editing a 400-word essay to fit a 250-word limit, a good editor knows to first consider the emotional weight and then cut around it. AI often protects the most literal summary of the essay’s theme, even when the better choice is to delete an entire scene and preserve one strange, honest sentence.
How does AI “professionalize” a teenager’s voice?
AI often reaches for resume language that sounds efficient and adult, but that’s often the wrong tone for a student. And this goes beyond just the essays; the Common App Activities List might seem like a place where a student can use AI to trim their accomplishments down to fit the frustratingly short 150-character limit, but even this section is a great opportunity to showcase a student’s voice. For example, one student we worked with described her role as a club treasurer with the phrase “budget baroness,” a tiny joke that immediately revealed her personality. An AI version might say she “spearheaded the strategic allocation of club funds.” That doesn’t sound like a teenager, and it’s rather predictable.
With only 150 characters, every word has to show what mattered, what changed, or how the student approached the work. AI doesn’t know which detail was personally important unless the student has already done that thinking.
Why is a polished first draft not the goal?
A first draft is supposed to help a writer discover the essay. Writing is thinking. While drafting, students remember details, notice contradictions, test metaphors, and sometimes realize that the real subject is different from the one they started with.
This is the biggest reason that our concern with students using AI in their college essays goes beyond style. In a 2025 MIT Media Lab preprint, 54 participants wrote essays using an LLM, a search engine, or no external tools. The brain-only group showed the strongest distributed EEG connectivity, while the LLM group showed the weakest and reported the lowest ownership of their essays. The study supports a familiar educational principle: the struggle to formulate an idea is part of learning.
Is using AI only for brainstorming safer?
AI brainstorming can still narrow an essay before the student has explored what is truly interesting about their ideas. Once a chatbot proposes a topic, outline, or metaphor, it is difficult to unsee that frame. The student may spend the rest of the process personalizing a statistically familiar idea instead of discovering a better one.
College rules also differ. As of August 26, 2026, some admissions offices allow general topic suggestions or brainstorming exercises, while others draw a much stricter boundary around application content. Students should read every college’s current policy and avoid assuming that a use allowed by one school is acceptable at another.
Brown
Examples the school permits: Basic spelling and grammar review
Examples the school rejects: AI used in conjunction with application content; submitted content must be the applicant's own work
Yale
Examples the school permits: Grammar or spelling review; general advice or topic suggestions at the start
Examples the school rejects: Submitting substantive AI content or output as the applicant's work
Caltech
Examples the school permits: Grammar and spelling review; brainstorming questions or exercises; application research
Examples the school rejects: Copying AI output; using AI to outline or draft; replacing voice; translating an essay
Cornell
Examples the school permits: Researching colleges or building a college list
Examples the school rejects: Using AI to outline, draft, write, translate, or create required portfolio work
Official policies: Brown |Yale |Caltech |Cornell
Our practical recommendation is to follow the strictest policy on your list for every essay, especially because students commonly reuse and reshape material across colleges. Keeping the substantive process human from the beginning is simpler, safer, and more likely to produce writing that sounds like you.
How can students brainstorm a memorable essay without AI?
To generate stronger essay ideas, we recommend that students start with lived details and then ask why those details matter. You don’t have to hunt for the most impressive event. Instead, find an entry point that reveals a distinctive way of seeing, choosing, wondering, or changing.
Make a list of details only you could claim. Write down objects, habits, fixations, purchases, family phrases, unpopular opinions, and everyday routines that your classmates probably could not copy. In our students’ lists, memorable details have included a backpack used since kindergarten, $173 spent on the game BitLife, and an obsession with the extinct Rocky Mountain locust.
Begin with an ordinary encounter. Strong essays do not require dramatic lives. Working at a bakery, meeting Uber drivers, or going to Costco—any of these can become a window into how a student pays attention to the world.
Try a defensible strong take. One student began from the claim that there are two kinds of people: those who talk to their Uber drivers and those who do not. The opinion became useful because the student had real encounters and reflections to support it. Important to note here is that AI often avoids these kinds of extreme positions, so your essay is more likely to stand out because of it.
Ask humans (early). Before a draft feels precious, share a brain dump or outline with a friend, family member, teacher, or counselor. Ask what stories they remember, where they have seen you change, and which contradictions they notice in you.
Write an intentionally imperfect first draft. Overwrite. Follow a strange connection. Leave yourself notes. A bad first draft contains more raw material than a polished paragraph generated before you know what you think.
Read many kinds of essays. Read successful college essays, but also read personal essays in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Notice how writers create meaning from ordinary moments. Take note of how an unusual structure can serve the essay’s content.
For a fuller guide to topics, reflection, voice, and structure, read How to Write the Common App Essay: A Guide to the Personal Statement.
How should you cut a 400-word essay to 250 words?
To shorten a supplemental essay without eroding its meaning, identify the emotional and intellectual heart first, then rewrite around that heart. Don’t ask an AI tool to shave a few words from every sentence. A shorter prompt usually requires a differently shaped answer.
Reread the exact prompt. A 250-word “Why Major?” response may ask for a narrower answer than a 400-word version. Let the wording determine what survives in the final draft.
Name the essay’s heart in one sentence. What does the reader need to understand about your values, perspective, or motivation? Focus on that core concept, then decide which details are most important to supporting it.
Mark the lines carrying emotional weight. Protect the revealing question, concrete detail, joke, or moment of reflection that another student could not easily write.
Cut whole branches, not a little from every leaf. Remove an entire scene, relationship, or explanatory thread if it does not serve the shorter prompt. This often creates more room than weakening every sentence.
Rewrite for the new shape. Build a fresh draft from the essential lines and ideas. Preserve your humor, descriptions, speech patterns, and use of dialogue when called for.
Get a human reader. Ask someone who knows you whether the shorter version still sounds like you and still makes sense without access to the original.
When we work with students who are struggling to edit their essays, we encourage them to think like a surgeon: protect the heart of the essay and cut around it. Don’t shrink the heart until it fits.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI and College Applications
Can colleges tell if I used AI on my essay?
There is no foolproof way for a reader or detector to identify every use of AI. However, in our experience, using an LLM always leaves a fingerprint — unusual phrasing, missing transitional moments, a lack of the deeper recognition that a fully considered essay will often have. A reader can’t always explain it, but something usually feels off in an AI-generated essay. Regardless if an admissions officer can tell or is using AI detection software, a student can violate an application policy even if the use is not detected. More importantly, AI can make an essay less specific and memorable even if an admissions officer never labels it as AI-written. The point is to wow them, and an AI essay won’t do that.
Is basic grammar checking allowed?
Some colleges explicitly allow AI-assisted spelling and grammar review, while others describe their boundaries differently. Check every school’s current policy. If you want the lowest-risk option, use the ordinary spelling and grammar tools already built into Word, Google Docs, or Pages, then ask a trusted human to review clarity.
When you plug an essay into an AI, it’s going to edit something. For example, it might tell you that an interesting way you worded something is “awkward.” It’s not a socialized human, though, and it is not the arbiter of truth on what is and is not graceful writing. Ask a person what they think.
Should I use AI for my Common App Activities List?
AI can help compress an activity description, but it may also replace a teenager’s specific experience with generic resume language. Before trimming, decide what mattered most: the scale, result, challenge, humor, initiative, or personal role. Protect that detail and write the description yourself within the character limit.
What if I am not a strong writer?
A college essay does not need to sound like it was written by a novelist or a 40-year-old executive. It needs to communicate a real person clearly. Start with a pen and paper if a blank screen makes you freeze. Tell the story aloud and record it, then listen back later to see what stands out. Ask someone who knows you to review a brain-dump and identify the lines that sound most like you. Revise repeatedly. A sincere, specific sentence is more valuable than a polished sentence that could belong to anyone.
There’s something charming about an essay that’s a tiny bit unpolished or raw in a world of over-edited, AI-generated writing. Don’t be afraid to sound like yourself.
What should students remember before submitting?
Before submitting an essay, a student should be able to explain why the topic matters, which lines carry the emotional weight, and how the final version reflects their own independent thinking. If those answers came from a chatbot, the essay might be polished, but it’s no longer doing its most important job.
Could another applicant plausibly submit this exact reflection? If yes, keep digging.
Can I talk naturally about every idea in this essay? If no, the framing may not be mine.
Did I preserve the details and phrasing that sound like me? If no, restore the human texture.
Colleges are trying to admit people who will contribute their own questions, observations, judgment, and energy to a campus. The application is not the place to average yourself out. The awkward draft, odd fixation, imperfect reaction, and surprising connection may be exactly what allows a reader to remember you after the file is closed.
How can Principia help you protect your voice?
Principia’s college consultants help students generate ideas through conversation, identify the emotional and intellectual heart of an essay, respond precisely to each prompt, and revise without replacing the student’s voice. Our role is to ask better questions and teach better decisions so the final application remains the student’s own work.
