Should You Use AI In Your College Admissions Process?

If you’ve spent any time on college-related Reddit threads recently, you’ve probably seen some variation of the same question popping up over and over: “Can colleges tell if I used AI on my Common App essays?”

While it’s easy to spend hours speculating about the depths to which college admissions officers are willing to go to figure out if an essay idea is student-generated or not, we tend to think these conversations are focused on the wrong thing. The biggest issue with AI and college essays isn’t whether an admissions officer can recognize that something was written by ChatGPT, but what gets lost from your applications when you introduce AI editing into your writing process.

Look, while we might be more likely than the average Joe to enjoy literary classics over a warm cup of Earl Grey and other elements of the analog life, we’re also well-aware that we’re not living in the Elizabethan era. We understand it’s totally normal in 2026 to turn to AI when you feel stuck. Especially when it feels like “writing isn’t your thing,” it’s tempting to throw a rough set of notes into ChatGPT to make them sound more polished, sophisticated, or like something an admissions officer would want to read. Or maybe you’ve avoided using AI for the most part, but you’ve watched classmates use AI for brainstorming and writing and started wondering whether you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage by not using every tool available.

While an increasing number of colleges have specific policies about how to use or not use AI in the writing process, at the time of this writing, most leave it up to you to decide to what degree your work is your own. So the goal of this blog isn’t to dictate the role that AI plays in your college applications, but instead to share our team’s collective expertise on the ways that we see AI tools impacting the quality and effectiveness of college essays, particularly what happens when students use AI to bypass the most creative elements of essay writing.

Colleges Do Care That Your Thinking Is Your Own

It might surprise students to learn that while many colleges have become increasingly strict about students using AI in their applications, some admissions offices have also started exploring how AI can be used on their side of the process. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, has acknowledged using AI tools to assist with parts of application review while still relying on admissions officers to make final decisions. With more than 70,000 applications in a recent cycle, it’s easy to understand why colleges are looking for ways to manage the sheer volume of information they receive.

But there’s an important distinction: admissions offices are using technology to help with a preliminary review of tens of thousands of applications, while you only have one opportunity to tell your own story. That’s why understanding each college’s AI policies matters. The Common Application already requires students to confirm that their application represents their own work and experiences. And many colleges have their own added clarifications and addendums.

Some schools, like Brown University, have incredibly strict policies. They’re clear that “the use of artificial intelligence by an applicant is not permitted under any circumstances in connection with application content. The content of all essays, short-answer questions and any other material submitted by an applicant must be the work of that individual.” (Though to be fair, they do also offer some leeway with editing, saying later that “Applicants may use AI tools for basic spelling and grammar review.”)

Yale takes a slightly different approach, allowing students to use AI in limited ways while still drawing a clear line around what needs to come from the student. They explain that “AI tools are inevitably ignorant of the foundation of a successful application: the unique person applying.” Yale allows students to use AI for things like reviewing grammar and spelling or seeking “general advice or topic suggestions at the start of the writing process.” However, they are very clear that “submitting the substantive content or output of an artificial intelligence platform, technology, or algorithm as your own work constitutes application fraud.”

The phrase students should pay attention to here is “substantive content.” Yale distinguishes between using AI to help you think through your writing process and using AI to create the actual ideas, structure, or content that appears in your application.

Caltech’s policy is especially interesting because it focuses less on the idea of AI as a rules violation and more on what students lose when they rely on it too heavily. They start their guidance by saying, “Your essays are where we hear your voice,” and they explain that “relying on AI to craft your essay will dilute your unique expression and perspective.” Caltech specifically lists examples of unethical uses, including “relying on AI to outline or draft your essay” and “replacing your voice and tone with AI-generated content.”

So let’s be clear — on the whole, colleges want students creating their own work, start to finish. That hasn’t changed and isn’t likely to in the coming years. Before you start writing, make sure that you’re crystal clear on the policies that each college has by checking their individual pages and FAQ’s.

The Problem With Making Your Essay Sound “Better”

One of the reasons AI is so tempting for students is that it can immediately make writing feel stronger. A paragraph that feels awkward can become smoother…on the surface. Or a sentence that feels “basic” can become more sophisticated in milliseconds. And a half-baked draft that feels impossible to finish can suddenly look much closer to the viral essays you see online.

The challenge is that sounding more impressive and being more interesting are almost never the same thing. And because AI usage has become so commonplace, the tired admissions officer reading 100 essays a day is going to be more adept than ever at noticing the patterns that AI writing creates. We’re not just talking about excessive em-dashes and corporate-sounding transitions (Who really uses the term “furthermore”??) that have become associated with ChatGPT, but the broader patterns that make AI writing feel different.

The Rule of Three is one easy example. AI loves creating lists of three because it gives writing a sense of balance and completeness. The X, Not Y structure is another pattern that hides in plain sight, where a sentence creates a dramatic contrast by saying something is “not just” one thing, “but” another. And don’t even get us started on the overusage of variations of the word quiet. (Really, how often are you actually thinking “But quietly?”)

Again, none of these things mean that a piece of writing was definitely created by AI. (Just ask any contemporary professional writer about how much they genuinely loved em-dashes before ChatGPT, and you’ll never hear the end of it). There’s nothing inherently wrong with these structures, and you shouldn’t be afraid to try them out in your writing when they genuinely make sense. The problem is that when these patterns appear over and over again without a specific reason behind them, the writing starts to lose the qualities that make it feel personal.

In a study comparing human essays with GPT-4-generated essays, researchers looked at whether AI could produce the same kind of creative diversity as human writers. When researchers adjusted prompts and parameters to encourage more creativity, the AI essays did become more varied from one another. However, they still contributed fewer genuinely new ideas to the overall pool of writing compared with human essays. Even when AI was told to “be as creative as possible,” it still tended to converge around similar underlying concepts.

And that makes sense when you think about how AI actually works. It is incredibly good at identifying patterns and generating something that looks like what has worked before — useful for coming up with a quick meeting summary, project plan, or other areas of life where speed and ease might supersede quality and detail. But the things that make human writing memorable often come from the parts of ourselves that are much harder to predict: our experiences, our frustrations, our strange interests, and the moments that changed how we see something. So don’t let AI edit and refine those blips away.

Writing Messily is How You Discover What You Think

So if you’re not going to use AI to generate your essay ideas, what should you actually do when you’re staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering where to start?

First, trust that the imperfect version of your writing matters.

One of the biggest mistakes we see students make is assuming that their first draft needs to sound like an amazing college essay. It doesn’t. In fact, some of the best ideas usually come from the drafts that are a little messy, a little too long, or a little unclear at first. I always encourage my students to ‘overwrite’ their first drafts — it’s so much easier to cut down than to try to expand an overly tight early version.

Writing is thinking. The process of trying to explain something forces you to figure out what you actually believe, what moments actually mattered, and what stories are worth telling. Sometimes you start writing about one thing and realize halfway through that the real essay was actually about something completely different. In fact, if that’s not happening, you likely aren’t pushing your ideas far enough.

So resist the urge to immediately turn your rough thoughts into a polished essay. The awkward sentence, the strange connection, or the detail that feels too small to include might actually be the thing that makes the essay yours.

Second, use AI as a tool to help you explore ideas, not as the person generating them for you.

Again, we’re not arguing that AI isn’t helpful as a writer. There are genuinely useful ways to incorporate AI into the writing process as a research assistant. Ask it to explain a complicated concept you’re researching. Use it to find statistics, historical context, quotes from experts, or definitions of words you’ve never encountered before. If you’re writing about a topic you care about, AI can help you go deeper and discover questions you didn’t know to ask.

That’s a very different process than asking ChatGPT to “write a college essay about my leadership experience.”

And finally, this might be the least technologically advanced advice we could give in an article about artificial intelligence, but if you’re really stuck…touch grass.

Seriously.

One of the biggest limitations of AI is that it has never actually experienced anything. It can describe what a summer evening feels like, but it has never noticed the way the air hangs heavy before a thunderstorm in DC. It has never replayed a favorite song and realized the lyrics mean something different years later when you’re sitting in your car crying after a breakup. It’s never finished a long run exhausted, sweaty, and so depleted of glycogen that you have to resort to licking old ketchup packets (and erm…neither have I!).

Jokes aside, these are all real “assignments” I’ve given my students this summer. Go do that thing you want to write about. Go back and listen to your favorite Beatles album for the millionth time. See a movie alone. Rerun your weekly long run and notice what you feel this time, now that the season is done. Get offline and write down the details you would normally ignore. Those details matter because the most memorable essays usually come from paying attention.

It might seem strange to slow the process down when there are so many tools promising to make everything faster and easier. But the best college essays come from actually experiencing things, reflecting on them, and figuring out why they mattered.

If nothing else, remember this: the strongest college essays are never memorable because they sound the most polished. No admissions officer is going around excited about a student because they figured out to use the word “quintessentially” in a cool way. The essays that make the difference are always the ones that reveal something unique and compelling about your thinking, your mindset, your development, and your life. So take the time to notice what really matters to you, and only you.