Rick Clark, executive director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his staff spent weeks this summer pretending to be high school students using artificial intelligence chatbots to fill out college applications.
The admissions officers each took on a different high school persona: swim team captain, Eagle Scout, musical theater performer. Then they fed personal details about the fictional students into ChatGPT, prompting the AI chatbot to produce the kind of extracurricular activity lists and personal essays commonly required on college applications.
Clark said he wanted to get a handle on how AI chatbots might reshape the admissions process this fall — the start of the first full academic year that the tools will be widely available to high school seniors — and come up with guidance for students applying to Georgia Tech.