Can You Use ChatGPT for College Essays and Still Write Authentically?

College essay requirements stress students out. As you put off the inevitable, you may wonder if any AI tools can help you tackle this daunting task. One of the most advanced AI writing assistants to emerge is ChatGPT. This tool can help students brainstorm essay ideas, create outlines, and even draft essays. As you read about its capabilities, you may ask yourself, “Can you use ChatGPT for college essays?” This article will help you confidently explore ChatGPT as a helpful writing tool for college essays without risking plagiarism or losing your authentic voice.

HyperWrite’s AI writing assistant can support your journey as you explore using ChatGPT for college essays. With this tool, you can harness the power of AI while maintaining complete control of your writing. As you produce content with HyperWrite, you’ll receive helpful suggestions and feedback to help you create a unique essay that reflects your ideas and voice.

Can You Use ChatGPT For College Essays?

Using ChatGPT to assist with writing your college essays may sound appealing. After all, who wouldn’t want to improve their chances of college admissions success with a tool that can write better than most applicants? 

But let’s be clear: Using AI to write your college essays isn’t a good idea. Admissions officers are on to this trend, and they don’t like it. 

College Admissions Essays are a Big Deal

You’re probably thinking: ChatGPT writes well, so why not use it for your college essays?

Let’s be honest. ChatGPT can write solid college admissions essays. Often better than many applicants. The writing is fluent, the structure is clear, and it hits all the right buzzwords colleges look for.

But there are two big problems:

• It doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like ChatGPT. Which means it also sounds like every other AI-generated essay, easily detectable by humans and AI detectors alike.
• Your goal isn’t to write an essay that’s good enough. It’s to write one that’s better than nearly all other applicants. 

Why Essays Carry So Much Weight at Top Colleges

That’s what selective schools demand. And it’s why essays matter more than most students realise. When tens of thousands of applicants have near-identical grades and test scores, it’s the essay that sets you apart.

Our analysis, based on data from the Harvard admissions lawsuit, shows that a strong essay can increase your chances of admission to Ivy-level colleges by up to 10×.

How to Use ChatGPT Without Losing Your Voice

So, can ChatGPT help? Yes, but only if you are doing the writing. Below, we’ll show you a real example of a ChatGPT-written essay, break down where it fails, and share how you can use AI to strengthen your drafts without outsourcing your voice.

In the end, if you’re serious about standing out, nothing beats working with a human writing coach. ChatGPT may be better than nothing,or better than Aunt Gertrude, but it won’t give you what top schools are looking for: 

• Authenticity
• Originality
• Depth

What’s the Problem with Using AI to Write Your College Admissions Essays?

Let’s start by examining an essay that ChatGPT wrote. It responded to this prompt that we provided: 

Note on prompting ChatGPT. The more detail you provide, the better ChatGPT will do. 

Here’s what the paid version of ChatGPT (the GPT-4 model) gave us in return:
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Wow. When you first look it over, it seems like a pretty good-sounding essay. The language is easy to follow, and the flow is engaging. 

But the essay fails on closer inspection:

• The content is poor - "These experiences have taught me a great deal about myself and others. In Mexico, I learned the immense power of patience and persistence." 
• It sounds good, but it doesn't give the depth college admission readers are looking for. They don’t want to hear that you learned something; they want you to demonstrate it. 
• Plus, the voice is clearly AI:
  
  • “The azure-blue day of my departure” 
  • “My belief in the transformative power of education” 
  • “Igniting a flame that has grown into a full-blown passion” 

Let’s dig in to show exactly why and how this kind of AI-written essay will let you down.

ChatGPT Writes in Its Own Voice. Not Yours

Your voice is one of the most essential elements of your college essays. These aren’t just writing samples, they’re stories rooted in your most meaningful experiences, crafted to show that you’ll thrive in college and beyond.

Admissions officers read your essays to understand who you are: 

• How you think
• What drives you
• Whether you’d be a valuable part of their community, both on campus and as a future alum. 

That’s impossible if they can’t hear your personality in the writing.

Why AI-Written Essays Are Easy to Spot

ChatGPT’s voice isn’t yours. As we’ve said, it’s a bland synthesis of what the internet thinks a “good” college essay should sound like. You might think it reads well, and you’re not wrong. But it’s generic. It’s not you. And admissions officers will know.

These readers review over 50 applications a day. While ChatGPT may be new to this admissions cycle, it won’t take long for officers to spot the patterns. AI-written essays have a distinct tone, polished but soulless. Phrases like “igniting a flame that has grown into a full-blown passion” don’t sound like a high school student. They sound like ChatGPT. And they show up across dozens of essays.

Why Tweaking AI Essays Still Fails

Many schools are also experimenting with AI detectors like CopyLeaks. They’re not perfect, but they’re improving. And they’re another layer of scrutiny you don’t want to trigger. Even editing a ChatGPT draft won’t solve the problem. 

It’s incredibly difficult to override the AI’s tone without losing clarity or coherence. More often than not, you end up with an awkward hybrid: part you, part chatbot. 

Authenticity Matters More Than Perfection

And when admissions officers only spend about eight minutes per application, they won’t waste time trying to sort out which voice is yours. If they suspect your essay was AI-generated, they’re more likely to move on. You don’t need to be a perfect writer. But your story needs to be unmistakably yours.

ChatGPT Doesn’t Understand What Admissions Officers Are Looking For in Essays

ChatGPT is nowhere near AGI, artificial general intelligence capable of thinking like a human. As computer scientist Cal Newport explains, it was trained on vast amounts of publicly available text, pulled from sources across the internet. It doesn’t “think” in any meaningful way. 

Instead, it uses a “word-voting strategy,” predicting the most likely next word based on the patterns it has seen. That means ChatGPT can only generate essays based on existing online content.

ChatGPT Learns from the Wrong Examples

Now ask yourself: Are most college essays on the internet excellent? Or are they average at best, or just plain bad? The truth is, most online essays aren’t very good. And that’s precisely what ChatGPT learns from and mimics. It can only reflect the quality of its inputs.

Worse, it doesn’t understand what selective colleges are looking for. It parrots common advice, such as “Tell your story” or “Help us get to know you,” without understanding what those phrases truly mean in an admissions context.

The Five Traits Top Colleges Are Really Looking For

What colleges really want is evidence that you’ll succeed on their campus and beyond. 

They’re looking for signs of five core traits:

• Drive
• Intellectual Curiosity
• Initiative
• Contribution
• Diversity of Experiences and Interests

Strong essays highlight one or more of these through specific, personal, and authentic stories, ones that show you’ve done things most applicants haven’t (or couldn’t have done as well).

ChatGPT doesn’t know how to make that distinction. It recycles surface-level narratives that sound right but fail to communicate what matters.

What ChatGPT Writes (Instead of What Admissions Officers Want)

Because of its pattern-matching, when ChatGPT writes an essay (or provides advice on a topic, or gives feedback on a draft), it focuses on the wrong things: Its writing and advice align with typical applicants, not those applying to selective colleges. 

Since it pulls advice and examples from all students, ChatGPT doesn’t follow the pattern of students who get admitted at selective colleges, which involves both making content highly compelling and fitting a lot of that great content into the essay’s word count (ie: writing very concisely). It focuses on descriptive language over content. ChatGPT uses a narrative approach, reflecting college essay advice found online. It will thus prioritize beautiful prose and descriptive language. 

Buzzwords Aren’t Proof, Action Is

But for selective colleges, most lovely phrases are missed opportunities to talk about an applicant’s potential for college success (ie: the 5 Traits). It uses buzzwords. ChatGPT incorporates common words and phrases it identifies across admissions essays and advice articles into its own essays. The phrases sound good, “I have a passion for empowering others.” 

But these buzzwords aren’t proof. For example, describing a time you empowered another person is far more compelling than simply stating I have a “passion for empowering others.” How the example essay would fail with admission officers 

Breaking Down Why This AI-Written Essay Fails

Now, let’s apply what we’ve learned here to our ChatGPT example essay. 

In broad strokes: 

1. These Are Things Most Students Would Do On A Service Trip 

The essay lacks any mention of how the student went the extra mile. It doesn’t delve into the impressive outcomes. It doesn’t show that this student is unique. This content just doesn’t cut it as compared to applicants at selective schools. In terms of the 5 traits, while there may be some drive/initiative here, the examples are weak. 

At best, the student decides to teach some English, as well as math, to the Mexican student Pablo and plans to tutor another student upon returning home. These are not particularly impressive examples of going above and beyond. 

Specificity Is What Makes a Story Compelling

The only way to improve the sense of this applicant’s drive and initiative would be to get more detail on the challenges involved in tutoring these two students and what the applicant did to overcome them. 

For example:

• Did they seek out books for teaching a child English quickly? 
• Did they consult with a great English-as-a-Second language teacher and use those lessons? 
• Did they meet resistance from the program and overcome it somehow? 
• Did they do this while simultaneously learning Spanish and overcoming jetlag?
  

We don’t know the specifics. And so none of it is in any way impressive.

2. The Essay Has Way Too Much Descriptive Language

Let’s look at the very first phrase: “the azure-blue day of my departure.” This may be nice, but it’s taking up space that is doing nothing for the admissions reader. Azure-blue days have nothing to do with this student. The admissions officer is looking for a reason to move this application from the huge rejection pile to the tiny acceptance pile. 

The fact that this student once experienced good weather is not that reason. There was no mention of lovely departure-day weather in the prompt we fed ChatGPT. It made this fact up! Does it matter? Actually, yes. Your essay should be factual and authentic. This essay isn’t that. 

3. The Essay’s Plethora Of Buzzwords Sound Nice But Add No Value

The last four paragraphs of the essay are nothing but buzzwords. 

We singled out some examples earlier: 

• “My belief in the transformative power of education” 
• “Igniting a flame that has grown into a full-blown passion”
  

Will these phrases get the admissions officer excited? Do they have a chance to move the essay from the reject pile to the admit pile? No! 

Belief Isn’t Enough. Show the Impact

Where is the proof that the student believes in the transformative power of education? There’s no evidence to suggest that this applicant has done more than tutor two students and had an average experience, encountering only minor obstacles along the way. 

In addition, the essay doesn’t show us what actions the student has taken now that they believe in the transformative power of education. What effect is this “full-blow passion” for education having on the applicant’s life? There’s nothing here to convince us. 

ChatGPT’s Content is Weak and Fluffy

These are things most students would do on a service trip. The essay fails to mention how the student went the extra mile. It doesn’t delve into the details of impressive outcomes. It doesn’t show that this student is unique. 

In terms of the 5 traits, while there may be some drive/initiative here, the examples are weak. At best, the student decides to teach some English, as well as math, to the Mexican student Pablo, and to tutor another student upon returning home. 

Going Above and Beyond Requires Evidence

These are not super impressive examples of going above and beyond. The only way to improve the sense of this applicant’s drive and initiative would be to get more details on the challenges involved in tutoring these two students and what the applicant did to overcome them. 

For example: 

• Did they seek out books for teaching a child English quickly? 
• Did they consult with a great English-as-a-Second-Language teacher and use those lessons? 
• Did they meet resistance from the program and overcome it somehow? 
• Did they do this while simultaneously learning Spanish and overcoming jetlag? 

We don’t know the specifics. And so none of it is in any way impressive. 

ChatGPT’s Essays Are Full of Fluff That Dismisses Your Authenticity

The essay contains excessive descriptive language. Let’s look at the very first phrase: “the azure-blue day of my departure.” This may be nice, but it’s taking up space that is doing nothing for the admissions reader. Azure-blue days have nothing to do with this student. 

The admissions officer is looking for a reason to move this application from the huge rejection pile to the tiny acceptance pile. The fact that this student once experienced good weather is not the reason. There was no mention of lovely departure-day weather in the prompt we fed ChatGPT. 

It made this fact up! Does it matter? Actually, yes. Your essay should be factual and authentic. This essay isn’t that. 

ChatGPT’s Writing Lacks Compelling, Truthful Content

ChatGPT uses whatever content you give it to write essays; if you don’t give it enough, it fills in the gaps for you. 

It has a few ways to do this (all bad):

• Waxing philosophical about the world or what you learned about yourself (this is where buzzwords tend to come in – see section above), or
• Adding made-up stories and anecdotes (ie, the azure-blue sky on the departure date). 

Again, this is why the seemingly well-written essays ChatGPT produces often fail upon closer inspection. In our example essays, once the AI gets past the Lori's story, it has multiple paragraphs of fluff where we really learn nothing more about the student. 

Why ChatGPT Struggles with Word Limits and Wastes Space

In addition, ChatGPT doesn’t yet have word-count capabilities. In other words, you can’t get it to write, say, a great 650-word essay or keep to under 200 words. Combined with its fluff-generating bias, this is a recipe for a lot of weak content. 

We’ve illustrated this concept below. In the ChatGPT-generated essay, all the parts an admission officer would consider fluff are in [Prompt blue] blue. 

ChatGPT Agrees with Us

We asked ChatGPT if it’s cool to write your college essays with it, and it said no. Can’t think of a much better argument than that!

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How You Can Use ChatGPT To Help You, With the Right Prompts

Generating ideas can be a big hurdle when writing a college essay. The college essay prompts want to know about you, so it can be hard to get started. You may not even know where to begin or what angle to take. 

Using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas can help you get the creative juices flowing. For instance, you can ask ChatGPT to generate questions to help you reflect on your life experiences. Responding to these questions can help you uncover a personal story that will make a great college essay. 

Outline Your Essay for Cohesiveness and Structure

College admission essays don’t follow one predefined structure, so you can approach them creatively and incorporate storytelling techniques. Two common approaches to structuring your essay are the: 

• Narrative structure: A chronological narrative that shows your character development over time.
• Vignette or montage structure: A multiple scenes connected by a common topic or theme). 

Regardless of the structure you choose, it’s important to establish a coherent narrative and ensure that your essay flows smoothly. You can use ChatGPT as a source of inspiration and to generate potential ideas for structuring your college essay. Do this by prompting the tool to create an outline using your chosen topic. You can make the prompt as specific as you like, mentioning any facts or viewpoints that should be incorporated into the output.

Get Feedback on Your Draft

You can use ChatGPT to help revise your essay before submitting it to ensure that it’s of high quality. ChatGPT cannot provide the same kind of informed feedback as a human, and it’s not able to adequately judge qualities such as vulnerability and authenticity. For this reason, it’s essential to also ask for feedback from two to three people who have experience with college essays and who know you well. 

You can use ChatGPT to generate feedback on certain aspects, such as consistency of tone, clarity of structure, and grammar and punctuation. You can seek the advice of a human essay coach or editor. 

Tips to Ethically Use ChatGPT to Craft a Well-Written College Essay: Integrate, Don’t 

Replacing AI should complement your writing efforts, not replace them. Sharing a personal story will always be the strongest way to approach writing a college essay. Admissions officers want to read essays that are uniquely you. Don’t ask a robot to write a human story. 

• Stay Updated: AI tools can be helpful, but they also have limitations. It’s essential to conduct thorough research before implementing an AI tool. Knowing how a tool works and using it effectively can be the difference between a thoughtless essay and a thoughtful essay. 
• Ethical Considerations: AI is not human, but it was created by humans. Unfortunately, this means that any unconscious biases its creators possess will be reflected in the technology. 

It’s essential to be aware of these biases when utilizing AI. AI is imperfect; while constantly evolving, AI makes mistakes and can generate incorrect or completely fabricated information. We recommend only using AI as a supplement to your own work. Using AI to write your essays and complete your assignments can (and likely will) have consequences. 

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Try our AI Writing Assistant to Write Natural-sounding Content

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT can help you brainstorm ideas and generate content for your college essays. But you need to be careful. The essays you turn in must reflect your writing style and voice, and there’s no way to do this with a generic AI tool like ChatGPT. 

You need a writing assistant that can learn your preferences and generate personalized content that matches your voice. HyperWrite is a next-generation AI writing tool that helps you write better. 

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Professionals transform rough thoughts into polished content quickly, expressing ideas in clearer language with ensured accuracy. Collaborate directly with AI inside the document editor and discover how fast thoughtful writing can be. Create your free account and start writing with an AI writing tool that gets you.

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