Today, I’m going to share how not to use ChatGPT. There are some huge mistakes that I am seeing students make out there, and you guys, it’s bad. You do not want your college admissions application to look like it was written by a bot because it will be rejected. And I know that’s not what you guys want.
My name is Brooke. I’ve been coaching students through the college admission process for over two decades. If you want support with SAT or ACT prep, we have an online course for the SAT. If you’re a tutor, we have an awesome tutor mode that allows you to drive all of your lessons through our platform, input and analyze blue book tests, and figure out exactly what areas students need to work on or assign homework based on those areas they missed on their blue book test automatically. It’s really cool, and I definitely recommend you check it out at supertutortv.com/educators. For students, you can check out supertutortv.com.
We also have an ACT online course that’s video-based. But right now we’re going to talk about college essays. We have multiple college essay consultants as well. I will say we all come from a storytelling background. So our goal is to help you present yourself in the best light possible and tell the best story possible. While some essay coaches and some college admissions counselors come from actual college admissions offices, they worked as admissions counselors; they read a lot of essays, and so they know what gets in. Our team knows how to help you write your best essay so we can coach you through the actual process of writing. A lot of those people who have been in offices know what it takes, but do they know how to help cajole you into writing the best essay you have to write? That’s another story, right? And so that’s the angle that we come at this from. And if you’d like the support, check us out at supertutv.com/tutoring.
Okay, let’s jump into this. First of all, just from an ethical standpoint, and you probably know this, full disclosure, I do not recommend using ChatGPT to cut and paste full sentences or full essays into your college admissions essay. That aside, here are some of the worst prompts that you can use and why they’re problematic.
My first prompt, which you should not tell ChatGPT that some students are telling ChatGPT, is “Here is my resume. Can you write a college essay about me that answers the following prompt?” Please, dear goodness, do not do this. If you want to be flagged by the AI bots, please do not do this with your essay. Please do not just feed in your resume and have ChatGPT pop something out. It’s going to be cringe-worthy. ChatGPT does not know the stories of your life from your resume. It’s not going to be good, people. Just don’t do it.
Number two, “Can you revise my college essay and make it better?” Now, some of you might be thinking that you wrote your college essay yourself, that you’re not going to make ChatGPT write your essay for you because you’re not that stupid. But you are going to ask it to revise it for you. You’re asking, “Isn’t that just like going to Brooke, who’s a college essay coach?” And I’m about to tell you, not exactly. And here’s why. When you ask ChatGPT to revise something for you, it takes a lot of liberties. In the video, you can see the prompt that I just entered in ChatGPT: “Can you make this college essay better?” There are a couple of problems with this prompt. The first thing is that it relies on an adjective that’s better, which is a judgment adjective. ChatGPT is really good at some things. It’s really good at telling you specific grammar rules. If something can be documented in a way that you can read it from a book and understand it and know it, ChatGPT is going to be good at it. It can do grammar, style, usage, variety, sentence structure, pacing, and tone consistency. It can analyze things in a mass data collection kind of way that, as humans, it would take us a lot longer to analyze. I can look for redundancies, I can look for good grammar, I can look for all of these things, and I can specifically ask ChatGPT to check those things for me. But when I use an adjective like “better,” ChatGPT begins to get creative. And when it starts to get creative, that’s when you get in trouble because it will start to write sentences that don’t sound like you. You need to be the arbiter of this process. You need to make the choices; you need to make sure that your college essay sounds like you.
So, here’s the original essay:
When I started high school in Korea, I decided to add another extracurricular interest to my life. Having spent a lot of time on STEM activities like making robots and joining math club, I felt my lack of artistic activities left a hole in my schedule and life. So I approached a piano teacher and asked him if I could take lessons. I soon began really loving playing piano. My teacher saw how much I loved it and so suggested that I try to play as part of my jazz band at school or form a small ensemble or quartet. Of course I was excited about getting to be on stage and having other people to play with. But Jazz band tryouts were not for another 6 months. The next day at school I found some friends who played instruments—a guitarist, bass player, and drummer—and asked if they wanted to form a jazz quartet. They were not sure this was a great idea—we didn’t have any sponsorship, teacher to guide us, or even a place to practice. We are just teens so how would that work? When I didn’t have answers to these questions I was returned with a lot of rejection, even after trying to ask more people. I was really embarrassed and worried that my idea wasn’t a good one. Would this be wasted time and a group that ended up not really meeting or performing after a few sessions? For weeks I was sad and this affected my interest at school and even my interest in playing piano. Maybe my interest in music wasn’t worth it. Maybe I should quit piano, I thought. That weekend, my grandfather came to visit and asked what I was up to. Embarassed about how all this music stuff was going I didn’t tell him about it. But later I felt ashamed. Why couldn’t I share how I had found a new interest? With my last bit of energy left, I decided I would talk to our school’s jazz band teacher. I asked if he would give me 5 minutes at the start of his practice before school to show my presentation and recruit 3 other musicians to a quartet. He said ok, so I made a PowerPoint slide deck and rehearsed my presentation. That night, I prepared a speech to encourage my classmates, complete with music clips to show what a quartet can sound like. To my astonishment people came up to me interested who didn’t even take guitar or electric bass, wanting to learn just to join my group. I found not 3, but 4 musicians to eventually join with enough experience to make it work. Months of rehearsal brought us to the moment of truth: our inaugural performance for a holiday show at a nursing home. I was amazed and delighted to find myself on stage, hearing the audience’s applause, playing music I loved. This experience of grit is one that I will always cherish. Giving up isn’t the answer; rather, thinking of new ways to build what you want is.
You can go back to the video to see how it was revised. So the first problem that I have when you ask it to improve something or to make it better is it just rewrites it for you. Okay, you don’t want to ask ChatGPT to rewrite it for you. It’s much better to ask ChatGPT for feedback or for the reasons why or if it can comment on what areas you can improve grammar on or what areas you can improve in regarding issues of redundancy. And I like to break it down into chunks, so I’ll take a chunk of the essay at a time. I’m not going to work on the whole essay at once; I’m not going to feed it the whole essay. I’m going to feed it a paragraph or a sentence even, and I’m going to ask it not, “How can I improve this?” but “What is my grammar? How is my grammar? Am I using redundant word choices? Am I using redundant sentence structure in this paragraph?” And I’m going to break it down into pieces. I’m going to go through each piece one at a time; it’s much more effective than just, “Can you make this college essay better?”
And in the video, there is a comparison, even just between this and asking ChatGPT a very subtly different prompt, which is “Can you give me feedback on my essay?” which I also did. And it did a better job when I asked for feedback. It didn’t start with a rewrite. It started with a bullet point list and then suggested it could write a rewrite, which, I’m going to be honest with you guys, I don’t want it to do a full rewrite. I would much rather have a bulleted list that I can go through one at a time and make choices and then do the edits myself and use it as a coach, not as an author. You see the difference? Not only do you get a better essay that’s your voice, but you also control the process.
So in the revised essay, it starts off with:
When I started high school in Korea, I decided to add a new dimension to my life.
This is not my original draft. I based the original draft on a student voice, and I changed lots of details and used a student sort of voice to make up a story. ChatGPT picked up on the fact that the first sentence was a little bit awkward and not well written, and it rewrote it. What I want to know from ChatGPT is that this is a little bit awkward and that I should rewrite it, not that it should write it as “I decided to add a new dimension to my life.” Because that sounds weird and dramatic and not like a 17-year-old. And this is what happens when you just say, “Make it better.” It gives you a whole thing. And then you know what students do? You guys cut and paste it, and then it sets off the AI detectors. Do not be lazy in this process. ChatGPT is an awesome tool that you can use as a bounce board, but don’t go in and just dump it. And you’re going to get a lot of these “new dimensions in my life” all over the place, where it takes your language that could use a little bit of work and completely screws it up.
Now, the last prompt I gave it was “Can you give me feedback?” It changed that line in its polished essay version, but it didn’t change it as much. And I think this is better:
I decided to add another extracurricular to my life.
That sounds more like the original, and it sounds more natural too. So it fixed it a little bit, but it maintained the student’s voice. Above all, though, I want you making each of these decisions. Every time it’s making a change, I want you to be able to go through that list. And here’s part of the list that it gave from the last one. When I said, “Give me feedback,” you can see how much longer this list of line-by-line feedback suggestions is than when I just say, “Make it better.” It gives me a much shorter list. The list from when I say, “Make it better” gives me five points, one per topic area. When I ask for feedback, it gives me a lot more bullet points. And even better, do it a paragraph at a time. It’s going to give you a lot more feedback. So if you chunk it out, you’re going to get better results rather than dumping and asking for better.
Here’s some more cheese that ChatGPT came up with:
As I sat at the piano, surrounded by friends and the sound of music, I realized that what mattered most wasn’t the applause, but the perseverance that brought me there.
I know this is AI, you guys. I can smell it from 10 feet away. These kinds of sentences are what happens when you say, “Make my essay better.” Please do not let them creep into your essay. Don’t do it. Thank you.
The next one is “Can you let me know if my essay is clear and makes sense?” Now, this might seem innocent enough. It may even seem specific. But ChatGPT has a fundamental problem in that it’s not human. And as human beings, like when another human being reads your essay, they can read it and say, “I don’t understand this” or “This doesn’t make sense.” And part of that comes from the fact that as human beings, we all have a limited amount of experience. I had a student write an essay about car racing. He used a phrase in his car racing essay, “red-lit.” I didn’t know what “red-lit” meant. It had to be clarified in his essay, which he did, but if he didn’t do that and I fed it into ChatGPT without a clarification, a lot of people would read it and not know what it means that you were red-lit. When you have a human being read your essay, even if they’re not an essay expert, they are an expert at what a layperson sees when they read something and whether things make sense. ChatGPT is not the source to go to when you’re trying to figure out, “Is my essay clear? Does it make sense?” Yes, it can look for major signposts of like clarity and concision and these kinds of things. But there is a gaping hole in its human experience and knowledge: in some cases it has so much knowledge, it doesn’t realize some things are not common knowledge. And some people will not understand what your writing means. It’s not going to know that. And you need a human to read your essay to make sure that it is clear and it makes sense.
Next prompt that I don’t like: “Is this an appropriate topic for a college essay?” So the thing about ChatGPT is it’s a little sycophantic, meaning it’s sometimes going to tell you what you want to hear. If it thinks you want it to be nice to you or say, “Oh yes, of course, that’s a great idea,” it basically sometimes isn’t going to tell you the hard truths. It also sometimes just doesn’t know them. It is a middling of the internet. It is pulling information from Reddit, YouTube videos, and experts, but also just from random parents and students giving advice all over the place. It does not necessarily know the full truth about everything, and its advice is sometimes misguided, in my professional opinion.
I have been doing college admissions coaching for a decade and a half, and I have found from experience that when my students disclose ADHD, I don’t think it helps their application. In fact, I’ve seen it potentially hurt it. When they disclose depression, most of the time, it’s not a good thing to disclose. Because, yeah, you might be over it now, but what if it comes back to haunt you? Colleges don’t want that burden on campus. There was a Cornell admissions officer who even said, “If you see mental health issues, that kind of is like a no-fly list for us.” They don’t want applications from people who disclose mental health issues. ChatGPT, if you ask it, “Should I talk about my depression in my college essay?” will say something like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea, but just make sure that it’s positive. As long as you focus on the fact that you’ve resolved your conflict, it will be okay.” It is true that you never want an essay to ring as negative or a downer. You always want to make it seem like you’ve overcome challenges, like things are in the past. If there are challenges that you’ve endured, you don’t want to make it seem as though things are continuing that are negative. I will agree with ChatGPT on that. But I will also say I typically don’t want students disclosing depression or ADHD.
The other thing about things like ADHD: you tell a college that you have ADHD, and suddenly your ACT score has an asterisk next to it. Because they know that you probably could qualify for extra time on the ACT. And if you did, that’s not going to help you. And if you didn’t, it’s also not gonna help you. If you disclose that you have learning disabilities, again, it can become an asterisk. Now, there are some cases where you have to disclose it, where your story isn’t complete without it, where nothing makes sense and you’ve got C’s and there’s no other way to explain it. And fine, that could be appropriate, but ChatGPT is not mature enough or human enough to be able to give you that kind of advice in sticky situations. So I would not expect it to. If you want that kind of guidance, we’re around; feel free to call us. And if you can’t afford private coaches like us, talk to your guidance counselor at school or your teachers. And get feedback from them if you can’t afford people like us or get feedback from aunts and uncles who maybe have more experience. But don’t ask ChatGPT. It’s not human. It’s not going to be able to give you advice on whether to disclose things that might be delicate, traumatic, problematic, or all that kind of stuff.
I hope you guys like this blog; I hope this was helpful!
