edtech and the epidemic of openai
everyone wants to be innovative nowadays, but these college application startups keep doing it wrong.
99.99% of the time, all of these glorified hackathon educational technology projects have a bunch of AI buzzwords; usually copy-paste in quality and—completely unrelated but kinda funny—tend to use the Poppins font.
I recently had the opportunity to meet the founders of one of these apps when my school sent out an email to juniors and seniors asking for beta-testers of a quote,
Boston-based startup building the first-ever AI-powered application outline tailored to every student's needs.
The kicker: the startup apparently plans to partner with my school district.
I was initially interested in going because I myself built an EdTech platform for my school (myBLA, which unfortunately does not use the ChatGPT API) and wanted to see how other startups went about the whole AI-EdTech thing.
My expectations were pretty low as one of the initial testers, and I didn’t expect for the platform to go very far, but I definitely have a couple of takes on the rise of these “AI-powered college application tools.” They keep popping up—and from my own experience trying some of them: they all do it wrong.
I think that there’s a lot of potential for AI in education; everyone’s said it before and they’ll continue to say it. At the same time though, I think that AI in college applications is constantly poorly executed. “AI College Essay Generators” will be the death of legitimately creative writing in college admissions. The testimonials draw you in with the “Our platform got kids into Stanford,” but none of these sites are old enough to have gotten anyone into college anywhere, much less a top college. Most AI-generated college essays reek of ChatGPT, and the admissions officers know it: the excessive use of tricola, the "delving into the vibrant tapestry,” and the most ridiculous: “Let me know if there’s anything I can fix!”
It’s sad seeing the personal statement be depersonalized by a ChatGPT wrapper, and all of these sites are so reproducible it’s only a matter of time before someone makes a template of it on GitHub so that you–yes you, can host one in your basement.
For an organization that is apparently partnering with my school district for this, the beta testing ended up having a terrible start: it’s blocked on school wifi. To be fair, my district blocks everything—myBLA’s main domain, mybla.app, is blocked; even my own personal site is blocked. Despite all of these anti-AI policies in school, ChatGPT isn’t blocked.
We went through the motions of signing up for an account, generating a couple of supplemental prompts, and building a college list during the demo, but I didn’t really enjoy the user experience. I am a bit picky about UI/UX, so I’ll let you take my words with some salt, but I don’t think I’m the only person who’d heavily denounce an ugly AI site. It’s supposed to be the future! At least make it look futuristic :(
I think the most interesting part about the demo was the pitch: it felt like they were trying to convince the seniors that this was going to be the next big thing that would “simplify our college application process” and “be innovative for the future,” but so many of the kids who signed up for this demo instantly saw through the BS. Imagine a bunch of college students getting bombarded with controversial AI ethics questions for 30 minutes straight as us kids get to munch on free pizza for our time.
Even though I myself was one of the kids who gave a “difficult question,” a lot of my peers agreed and brought up some of the points I wanted to touch upon too: what are the ethics of using this platform? Why is this platform useful, versus just prompt engineering on ChatGPT yourself?
So that brings us to the big question:
If all of these platforms are all terrible, how the hell are we gonna fix it?
Someone’s gonna use this post as a framework for their 50th AI college application startup and still take none of my advice. However, I think that there’s a solution that nobody’s really tapped into:
Stop trying to make the college application process easier through essays.
Sure, everyone hates writing college essays unless you have a passion for writing or literature or just words in general. Sure, it would be nice to just take the easy way out and AI generate an essay instead. However, there are more optimal ways to build an education AI platform that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the actual essay:
giving feedback on essays instead of just doing it for you,
providing recommendations for colleges to look into
and in other terms, shortening the amount of research you have to do for a college’s why us essay (e.g. a list of notable programs, being able to do college research from within the platform),
or providing formatting help for activities/creating your activities list from your resume
Now, the startup that visited my school actually did the last bullet point, and I think that was their only redeeming factor. These AI-powered college application sites tend to throw the ethics of using AI in academia out of the window, but when used in a good way, I think it could be so much cooler than what’s currently being pushed to the masses.
At the end of the day, these sites/apps thrive on the mass hysteria surrounding Ivy League admissions, and the uncertainty surrounding “getting accepted” is never actually alleviated by using one of these platforms. In fact, it should make you more anxious, since now you have to worry about colleges flagging your writing as AI for using such a platform.
So that brings us to the end of my malformed rant on ChatGPT in college application platforms. We are unfortunately living in an epidemic of AI-generated-everything, but it IS possible to use AI in ways that aren’t so handhold-y—or in my opinion, lazy. I believe anyone can let their voice shine in writing, since it’s one of the things that makes us human. It’s really just a matter of not letting people trick you into taking the easy way out of things for a cash grab.
Take SmartPass for example: kids at my school hate it, but I wouldn’t mind working there one day. It’s a digital hall pass system my school uses that monitors the hall passes people take around the building during the day. One of their features uses AI to track trends in students leaving certain classes at similar times every day to flag students that tend to skip class by going to the bathroom. Cool right? At least it’s somewhat curbing the amount of serial-skippers.
While there are a couple of cons (namely the maximum amount of students that can be allowed out at once in our 1,700-student body or the “no fly zone” during the first and last 10 minutes of class), I think it uses the AI-pitch in a cool way, probably because of the lack of generative text nonsense.
That being said: don’t be that kid to spend 50 dollars a month on a probably-buggy, probably-ugly, and probably-useless app. Don’t let any of them convince you that someone went to a top college thanks to that site. If you’re smart enough to think you have a chance to be admitted or attend one of these “elite” colleges, you probably aren’t the target audience for these sites anyway.