Intrant robots
I lied about not posting any more until after Christmas. Oops!
My household has gotten hit with little, non-COVID fevers two weeks running, thanks to daycare. So this is kind of an unvarnished post. I had an interview for a new day job last Friday and probably came across as glassy-eyed and overexcited.
But enough about me. Let’s talk about robots!
Are you excited, scared, or both about ChatGPT? I’m a little of both, leaning more toward scared. Since this is a newsletter about college admission, we’re going to leave the killer robot drones to one side and focus on this question: what do eerily language-capable AIs mean for college essays?
My hunch is that they eventually make the essay a fully robot affair. In many cases, an AI will (help) write the essays, then an AI will read them.
Robots are cheaper than admissions officers
Colleges receive a lot of applications, and, for many, the number is increasing. We learned from the SCOTUS transcripts that UNC gets around 40,000 and Harvard around 61,000 applications a year. Admissions officers have to read all of them, or at least process them all in some cursory way in an initial cull before paying more attention to the “good pile.”
That is an expensive process! Colleges have to divert admissions officers’ salaries away from their core functions of teaching and research — or from other things that could boost them up the US News rankings. Admissions officers would retort that they’re the ones sorting out the full-pay wheat from the chaff and so are bringing plenty of dollars in the door.
At this point in our imaginary debate, a robot would poke its bleeping-blooping head in the door and point out that it, too, can determine which applicants are rich and smart by reading their essays. Last year, Alvero et al. learned from 240,000 undergraduate application essays that certain topics and writing styles are correlated with SAT scores and family income. So, an AI could learn to sift through essays and find the ones written by smart and rich kids.
The robot would add that it can surmise from essay style which applicants are likely to do well in college. In 2014, Pennebaker et al. found that certain style elements predict higher grades. That prediction would be very valuable to colleges, which really do not want to admit kids who are going to fail out. That hurts the US News ranking.
A self-promotional aside: would you like to learn the takeaways from those two studies, as they could apply to your child’s essays? If so, you could schedule a one-on-one consultation here.
An AI could write kids’ first drafts
Realistically, some applicants are already doing this. Someone who is better at programming than I am could make a college essay-writing AI that includes the features from those Alvero and Pennebaker papers. (Please don’t steal my idea! I swear I’m going to take that Python class!)
What would I tell a client who asks me whether to do this? Ethically, I don’t think it’s plagiarism, as long as the kid revised the robot’s first draft. If somebody bakes a Duncan Hines box-mix cake, it’s not from scratch. But it’s also not stolen from a bakery.
In terms of effectiveness, the answer is probably: why not? If ChatGPT gets you a first draft, cheaply, to work from, what’s the downside? The eventual final draft probably won’t trip a plagiarism checker.
Is that a bummer? Without a doubt. But college admission is zero-sum. If your adversary in the arms race gains an advantage, you can’t abstain from it, if you’re trying to optimize for admission. Moloch prevails, as Scott Alexander would say.
Want to talk more about essays or any other part of the process? You can sign up for a one-on-one consultation or an online class on my website. I look forward to working with your family!
