By now you probably have heard about the bright new shiny thing that students are using to generate a formatted essay in their English class or even on their college admission essays called ChatGPT. The purpose of this post is not to make you feel worried or give you additional angst. Instead, I want to give high school counselors a little bit of information about this new app and to help counselors address concerns about this new AI tool with teachers, administrators, parents, and even students.
What Exactly is ChatGPT?
When I asked ChatGPT to define itself, it gave me a pretty clear explanation. ChatGPT said, it "is an online conversation platform where users can chat with me, an AI assistant. Users can ask me a wide range of questions about various topics such as science, trivia, history, common knowledge, and hobbies. I'm very friendly and creative, and I'm always here to help you!" In other words, it is a machine learning model trained on a large database of text to generate human-like responses, not unlike those you may experience when talking to Verizon.
Sounds pretty cool, right?! And, it is! I played around with it with my daughter and I asked it to complete various tasks which only took about 30 seconds or less to generate a response. For instance, I asked it to write an email to an angry parent from a school counselor and it popped it out in no time. I was genuinely impressed with the outline of the email.
Here is what it wrote...
Hello,
I hope this email finds you well. My name is [Your Name] and I am a counselor at [School Name]. I understand that you are upset about a recent incident at the school, and I wanted to reach out to address any concerns you may have.
Firstly, I want to extend my sincerest apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Please know that we take matters like this very seriously and are committed to ensuring safety and well-being of all students at our school.
I know that you may have questions regarding the incident, and I am here to answer them to the best of my abilities. Please do not hesitate to reach out any time, and we can set up a time to speak in person if that is more convenient for you.
Again, I apologize for any frustration or distress this may have caused you and your family. Our goal is always to create a safe and positive learning environment for all of our students, and we will do everything in our power to ensure this remains the case moving forward.
Thank you for your understanding,
[Your Name]
Ok, this was not a bad form letter and it provided a great template for getting started, if I had to write a letter to an angry parent. So, I can see why a student would definitely use ChatGPT to get started on an assignment or even, a college essay.
So, What's So Concerning About ChatGPT?
I downloaded the ChatGPT app yesterday, started making commands of it to give me information about things I wanted to know (i.e. cheapest vacation destinations), and it didn't disappoint. I begin to think how I could use this app in my daily life, but our students have already figured this out way ahead of us adults. In fact, technology is really outpacing our ability, as educators, to keep up and students definitely have the advantage. In fact, one former Shakespearian professor, Stephen Marche, wrote about his experiences with this new technology and how it has changed the game in education.
"It will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for the university administrators to decide what, if anything to do about it."
I surmise that may be the same response by our schools (sigh). In fact, as a counselor, I often feel behind when it comes to using the latest and greatest tech tools in my presentations or when working with my students!!
Currently, one of the phenomenon of ChatGPT is that students are now using it as a tool to write their assignments. Of course, cheating has always been a thing. Who can really prove if Aunt Mildred, an English teacher at a local university, really wrote your student's college essay that was submitted to the college? However, when an admissions advisor put a Common App prompt into ChatGPT, it only took about 10 minutes to create a fairly decent, well formatted essay. In fact, two former admissions advisors from Ivy League schools admitted that it was hard for them to detect that the essays were written by an AI tool! Also, one of them predicted that a ChatGPT written essay may even work at less competitive colleges. However, when they read the ChatGPT essay, they could detect that the essay was sterile and lacked a human voice. With competitive college admissions and the college essay becoming more of a factor in the application, this is not the type of essay a student wants to submit as part of their application. One piece of information that I heard from the college admissions webinar, that I recently attended regarding ChatGPT was this, "don't ignore it, but don't worry about it." I thought that was kind of comforting as a school counselor, especially as my administrators and teachers are beginning to freak out of this new AI tool that is coming out to destroy the minds of kids!
How Can School Counselors Get Ahead of the Technology?
First, know that you cannot stop it! We haven't stopped texting, Instagram, nor TicTok, so you are not going to stop ChatGPT. Take that weight off your shoulders. However, you can educate your staff, students, and parents about this tool and how it should and should not be used for college essays.
1. Educate students, staff members, and parents that ChatGPT is a cool, first level tool for getting information.
2. Let them know that ChatGPT is not relevant for writing a college essay. ChatGPT produces mediocre, middle school level essays that highly selective colleges will identify as low quality because they lack emotion, introspection, or personal growth. It is not good for highly selective colleges.
3. ChatGPT produces essays that often are superficial, predictive, and cliche' and not what a highly selective college wants in an essay. This puts students at risk of possibly being rejected if the essay is what is needed to make a judgement between two students for admissions.
4. The most important part of writing an essay, according to the experts, is the theme of the essay. Colleges do not expect perfection, but want to know about the student. ChatGPT cannot help a student do that!
How Might ChatGPT Impact College Admissions
CollegeWise wrote an article about how ChatGPT can impact future college admissions decisions. Some of the responses of colleges might include:
1. Honor statements may be included on the college admissions application. That means students must prove they are not a robot on an application.
2. Timed hand-written proctored essays may be required. Not sure how this would look or who would do the proctoring...yikes!
3. Essays may be replaced with another criteria.
4. Essays must become deeper showing student voice.
5. The SAT and ACT may become more important again.
So, ChatGPT is here to stay. It has its advantages as a first level informational tool, but not a college essay writing app. As a school counselors, it is important to educate your staff, students, and parents on the pitfalls of using this app for college admissions. Having procedures in place for writing essays can be very beneficial to help students avoid desperation.
Download a handout for students from my TPT store for free to use when speaking to students.
Should I Use ChatGPT to Write My College Essay?
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