A Dialogue About How ChatGPT Shaking Up College Admission

Some thoughts around a recent publication in The 74 Million

I recently sat down with my friend Chris Horne who is the Director of College and Career Counseling and Alumni Support at Girard College in Philadelphia, PA. We talked about how ChatGPT is impacting the college admission landscape. Our conversation resulted in a piece entitled “Rethinking College Admissions and Applications with an Eye on AI” that was featured in education news publication The 74 Million. Click here to read the article in full.

Putting together this article was an interesting exploration of technology, admission trends, and personal ethics. Below is a highlight of the dialogue Chris and I had.

I hope you find our conversation and the article insightful.
Mike

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Mike: So this article was your idea, Chris. What got you thinking about ChatGPT?

Chris: I’ve been reading a lot of news lately about ChatGPT. It’s really revolutionary. The AI (artificial intelligence) behind the tool is fascinating, and I think it has a number of implications for schools and beyond. Maybe it’s useful to explain what ChatGPT is for people?

Mike: I can try. ChatGPT is a predictive language tool. You input questions or prompts. It responds using an AI that predicts how humans might or are expected to respond. It’s not connected to the internet, so it doesn’t have unlimited information or parameters, but it does pull from a huge amount of cataloged internet archives.

Chris: So almost like Skynet, but not quite.

Mike: Exactly. That was my first thought: Are people building an AI that’s going to take over?!? I think the answer is no. It just acts as a natural text response tool. So you can input nearly any prompt with unlimited parameters, and it will put out a response within those parameters.

Chris: That’s my understanding too, and why I think it’s important for anyone in schools to explore the implications. Some people have equated ChatGPT to a calculator in math. But I think it’s a bit more complicated of a relationship than that.

Mike: Interesting. Tell me more about what you’re thinking?

Chris: Well, with a calculator, it’s never going to complete the entire problem for you by using mathematical predictions. You have to input a problem or an equation. A calculator doesn’t allow you to input a whole series of parameters and then respond with a developed, human-like, predictive output based on what it thinks you might want. It responds directly to your input, and that’s it.

Mike: Versus the ChatGPT AI, which is actually using its parameters to try to predict how you want it to respond based on your input.

Chris: Pretty much. That means it has much wider ramifications for education than just the calculator. 

Mike: I get where you’re going. So a student might input something like “write a summary of The Great Gatsby in 450 words at a 9th grade level” and ChatGPT would try to create a response directly to your input?

Chris: Yes. Which leads us to the challenge for college admission, and specifically the college essay. For our article, we wanted to highlight how you can use increasingly complex inputs to create a useful college essay.

Mike: And I think it worked fairly well, don’t you?

Chris: I think so. While it doesn’t have a true student voice that is easily identifiable in the final essay we asked it to produce, it constructed a piece of writing that would have been very workable as a draft for a college essay.

Mike: I agree. And I think we could have pushed it by inputting more parameters to produce something closer to an actual student’s voice. 

Chris: Definitely. Which raises mostly ethical questions. Personally, I’m still grappling with issues around plagiarism, fraudulent representation of writing, and how people might just use it to produce an essay and game the system.

Mike: Me too. I think it’s going to take careful and forward facing attention from teachers and admission professionals to coach students to use the tool in responsible ways. That’s why I think it’s critical that we all get onto ChatGPT, test it out, and see how students might use it. I would even go so far as to say that we should come up with direct lessons and guidance around how to engage with the tool in an ethical way.

Chris: I agree, and I think it brings up another issue: The admission environment that we’ve created is one where everyone thinks they need to go to a highly rejective (shoutout Akil Bello) college to make something of their future. If we continue to cultivate this kind of environment, then students will continue to think they need to use a tool like ChatGPT to produce their essays or other elements of the college application.

Mike: Alright, good chat, Chris. I hope people will read our article, give us some feedback, and dig into ChatGPT.