College Admissions in the Age of AI
How are admissions counselors supposed to choose?
Recently I was helping my cousin apply to high school. He reads voraciously and is doing advanced math, but for some reason his writing was childish and littered with mistakes.
I initially rewrote his application essays in the voice of what I imagined was a sophisticated 8th grader — think lots of exclamation points paired with stabs at olde english verbiage. But then I trawled through my old school files and skimmed my own 8th grade writing and realized that I was making my little cousin look like a fool. My younger self’s writing was choppy, but it delivered its message in inoffensive prose without coming across like a coked-up 3rd grader.
I rewrote the essays again. This time I focused on cleaning up the grammar, using clear word choice, and choosing themes that were sophisticated without being suspect. In some places I couldn’t wesist using childish constwuctions in the hopes of tugging on the heawtstwings of some admissions employee.
My cousin should get into this school because he’s smart. He can easily handle the academics, and the prep environment will help him socialize with other smart kids. However, the only real opportunity he has to prove this is the admissions test. His essays, and I’m sure the essays of every other applicant, are basically fake and a test of who can find the best mercenary writer for hire.
This is basically the same situation that exists at top colleges today. Their decision to remove standardized testing requirements may go down as one of the most poorly-timed decisions in history. Top schools removed an objective, proctored measure of performance and substituted it with a form of assessment which every student can now game by asking their writing assistant — GPT-4 or Claude or whatever — for advice, ideas, or complete rewrites. There’s no way to catch this that any halfway-intelligent student can’t game.
Who is going to get into top schools now? It seems like there are three categories:
Meritocrats:
if you do well at PRIMES, RSI, USAMO, USAPHO, USACO, Regeneron, ISEF, Davidson Fellows, etc you’ll probably get into a top school
Rich:
having a building waiting for you on campus or a rec letter from the pope cannot hurt your chances
Athlete/Diversity Picks:
no need for explanation
I’m not sure where that leaves the vast majority of people. There is now no easy way to identify “diamonds in the rough” because gpa and essays are eminently fake and not commensurable between schools. There was, and is, a lot of free SAT prep online from places like Khan Academy and others, and that was also the only prep that my friends and I did.
Yet schools persisted in removing the SAT because it told them a story they didn’t want to hear. The consequences of that decision will probably remove any remaining possibility they have to serve as engines of social mobility or development for the large subset of intelligent people who have not identified their comparative advantage by the time they leave high school.