AI and College Essays: Wrong Question, Wrong Answer

08/29/23 • 22 min

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The sudden availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have raised new questions about authorship, plagiarism, and fairness in college admissions. Hannah and Mark discuss why they think these tools are unlikely to help applicants gain an advantage in Yale’s selection process and why questions about generative-AI are the wrong starting point for understanding how to compose an effective college essay. LLMs can appear very knowledgeable, but they are inevitably ignorant of the foundation of any successful application: the unique person applying.

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Application Update 2023-2024

At the start of the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, Jackie joins Hannah and Mark for the second annual preview of the new and updated questions that will be on Yale’s first-year application. The admissions officers discuss the annual process of reviewing and revising the Yale-specific questions and the staff’s thinking behind each one. This episode is an update to Episode 6: Essays: The Little Stuff, originally released in summer 2020.

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