The undergraduate admissions essay is a unique form of writing where the entire purpose is to reveal an individual human being, something that AI can’t replicate.

A high school senior sits down to write their college application essay. She types a prompt into Claude and receives multiple polished paragraphs in seconds that are grammatically flawless, emotionally resonant and well organized. While many people have expressed opinions on the ethics of this scenario, few have evaluated whether large language models like Claude or ChatGPT, by their technical design, actually produce better college admissions essays. Without that understanding, many students are being fooled by the artificial intelligence models themselves into ruining their college applications.

I’m a college essay coach and technical product manager who has worked with AI in production systems at tech companies like Lyft and Headway. In product management, evaluating a solution requires a clear definition of success. The same principle applies here: To understand the impact of large language models on your college application essay, we first need to define what a successful essay is. Fortunately, admissions officers have already done that for us:

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“I just want to know what makes you the person you are. I want to know what matters to you. I want to know what you care about,” former Cornell University Dean of Admissions Shawn Felton told authors Kim Lofton and Susan Knoppow in their book “How to Write an Effective College Application Essay.” 

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Christoph Guttentag, Duke University’s........

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