Transfer Application Essays & AI

A student just asked me for help in writing a Transfer Essay for an application to UM.  I offered to look over the essay and I was struck by how formal it was and how it was very detailed, without a single grammatical or punctuation error.  The writing style was VERY different from the writing in our e-mail correspondence.

You probably have heard of ChatGPT, a free program that will use Artificial Intelligence to write on any subject after entering key information. 

There is a free AI Checker https://gptzero.me/ developed by a student at Harvard ( https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1147549845/gptzero-ai-chatgpt-edward-tian-plagiarism– ) - a professor here at MC told me about it after a student turned in a suspicious paper and the AI Checker confirmed that AI was used. 

I copied the transfer essay and pasted it into the AI Checker and it came back saying “Your text is likely to be written entirely by AI.”  I then put in a paragraph that I had written to compare and it said, “Your text is likely to be written entirely by a human.”

The GPTZero checker will even highlight specific sentences within a passage with the note: 

🟨 Sentences highlighted are more likely to be written by AI

I responded to the student and said that when I used GPTZero to analyze it, it said that it was likely AI was used.  I said I was concerned because the writing in the essay seemed very different from the writing used in e-mails to me. I asked the student to take the main ideas from the essay and re-write them in simpler sentences. 

It’s important to help students understand that using an Artificial Intelligence program like ChatGPT to write essays and papers for classes will likely result in detection of plagiarism.  My guess is that it will become a standard practice that all essays and papers will be checked for ChatGPT by colleges and in the professional world. 

PS – I just checked this message and this was the result:   A human wrote it!

Anne Schleicher, Transfer Counselor (Part-Time)
Montgomery College Online Advising Services