Deerfield, Colleges Address Artificial Intelligence in Admissions

Two weeks into the January application-reading season, artificial intelligence (AI) was “front of mind” for the Admissions Office, according to Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Chip Davis. Since 2023, he’s seen a steady increase in the number of AI-written essays his office receives. 

Following the introduction of ChatGPT—released initially by OpenAI in November of 2022—AI use by high school students has gone up to nearly 80% nationally, the College Board Newsroom reported. 

College admissions offices have started responding to the national surge in AI use, from restructuring their essay-writing process to even utilizing machine learning. At Georgia Institute of Technology, admissions officers pretended to be applying to high school students, feeding ChatGPT details about themselves to understand how to tackle the upcoming admissions cycle. 

At Bowdoin College, students can choose to receive randomly generated questions from a list of 100, which they have a minute to talk about. According to Science Teacher Rich Calhoun, who spoke with an admissions officer at the college, applicants’ verbal responses help the team identify which essays are written with AI. 

But at the college level, most admissions offices don’t automatically dismiss students if they suspect AI use. In an interview with the Scroll, Director of First-Year Admissions at University of UMass Amherst Erin Bernard explained that her office doesn’t reject applicants for suspected AI use—and they don’t put in a lot of time and effort into deducing if something is AI-written.

“It is something that we take into consideration ... we might look and see what the recommen-

dations say, is this a student who has had any kind of infractions for this?” she said, adding that the process is primarily trust-based. 

“We’re not going to assume something is AI unless it’s really obvious,” she said. She worries about false accusations, which, to her, are more of a concern than punishing someone who did use AI.

The point of an essay isn’t to evaluate an applicant’s writing ability, Ms. Bernard said—instead, it’s about understanding who they are as an individual. 

Each spring, before Deerfield students leave for the summer, the college advising office meets with current juniors to talk about a plan for the upcoming college-heavy fall. In their meeting, they discourage advisees from using AI to write essays. One-on-one, the advisors stress the importance of authenticity in applications, College Advisor Jamie Brightman explained.

“Hopefully, we’re getting people excited about telling their story,” she said.

In her experience, the majority of colleges prohibit students from writing essays with AI but

many allow “idea-generation” and editing. “I think it’s totally fine to use AI to help you shape

your narrative and improve that essay,” Virginia Tech Assistant Professor Louis Hickman said, who works in the university’s psychology department and leads the admissions’ AI research team, in an interview with the Scroll.

“Colleges, when they set rules around essays, are unrealistic,” Mr. Calhoun said. “They think that they’re catching kids who use AI. My guess is that the kids that they think that they aren’t catching are just better at AI than the adults are,” he added.

Even before the widespread adoption of large language models, the Academy’s College Advising office dealt with student essays influenced by parents or outside college advisors. At the national level, 26% of students scoring in the 80th percentile or higher on the SAT or ACT work closely with a private college advisor, according to a survey by higher-ed-specialized

marketing agency Lipman Hearne.

If Ms. Brightman—or another advisor—suspects a student used an AI platform or an outside source to write their essay, they won’t immediately refer the student to the Academic Affairs office. Instead, Ms. Brightman explained, she’d stress the importance of maintaining a unique and cohesive voice.

“I would say, ‘I feel like you’re missing an opportunity in this essay,’” she said, adding that “every situation is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and if something were significantly concerning, it’s likely Academic Affairs would be involved.”

From the admissions side, many college offices are beginning to use AI tools to filter through student transcripts, GPAs, and essays. A 2023 Intelligent survey reported that 50% of higher education institutions had used an AI tool in the admissions process, and 82% of all educational institutions planned to implement one in the next year.

Virginia Tech is one of a few colleges using an AI model to evaluate student applications. Now,

essays are graded by one human member of their admissions team and one AI reader on a 12-point scale. If the two grades differ by more than two points, the office brings in a third reader. Typically, the 2-point difference between the human and machine learning scores occurs about 10% of the time, Dr. Hickman estimated.

His research team at Virginia Tech focused on ensuring a fair, unbiased machine-learning system, inputting essays attached to different demographic groups to see if their AI-reader responded consistently. 

Before proposing their AI reading system to the school’s president, Dr. Hickman’s team collected years of data—on everything from student first-year GPAs and transcripts to previous admissions’ essay scores. Their office, which receives about 60,000 applications each year, was able to release their early decision results five weeks early.

“Almost every undergrad admissions office is strongly thinking about it but afraid to do it,” Dr. Hickman said. “We were either the brave ones or the dumb ones to go ahead and be the first.” He added that his team thought it was important to educate peer schools about the positive use of AI.

CalTech admissions has also implemented a similar AI reading system. According to their website, their AI essay-rating program scans about 250,000 essays in under an hour, compared with a human reader who averages two minutes per essay. Still, they verify essay ratings with their admissions officers.

“There are a lot of guardrails that these admissions offices want to build into their process, because they don’t want to end up with a disaster on their hands,” Ms. Brightman said.

At the Academy, Mr. Davis explained that the admissions office isn’t currently interested in implementing AI tools. “I think Dr. Austin would be worried that it was inconsistent with our core values,” he said. Not using AI essay-readers is “the admissions’ way of saying we do face-to-face,” he added.

Mr. Calhoun compared AI with the mid-90s release of the internet when he was a boarding student at Groton School. “It’s interesting to now listen to my colleagues sound very similar to my old teachers, deeply concerned that the internet was going to ruin education,” he said. The Academy was an early internet-adopter and now holds an “.edu” internet domain, while other schools—such as Hotchkiss School—have a “.org” domain. 

“People in general have negative reactions to being assessed or evaluated by AI, and in undergrad admissions, that’s no exception,” Dr. Hickman said. He explained that most schools are “worried that it’s going to cause reputational harm.”

AI tools are causing admissions teams to rethink how they approach the essay, he explained—from implementing in-person writing samples to integrating video responses.

“What if we started making people write their essays in a blue book with crayons?” Mr. Calhoun

asked. “Do you think somebody who’s a genius could write an essay with crayons and a blue book that convinces Harvard that they’re a genius? They definitely could.”

To address the rising number of AI-generated essays the Deerfield admissions office receives, the team is considering an in-person writing approach for the next application cycle. For now, they encourage students to write in their own voices. Refusing to do so “is effectively a breach of integrity,” Mr. Davis said.