00:00:05 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): Hi, everybody! Welcome, welcome. As you all are trickling in, I’m so excited to introduce today’s session, today’s speakers, and myself.
00:00:13 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): Today’s session is on AI and admissions, how much is too much? We’re going to talk about all things AI in the college application process. I am Maya El-Sharif, I’m a Pioneer alumni myself, a recent graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, and a second year at Duke Law.
00:00:29 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): I’m really excited to introduce Justin Mooney, Director of Recruitment, Office of Admissions at Carnegie Mellon University, and Matthew Jaskal, the Founder and Director of Pioneer Academics.
00:00:40 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): As people are trickling in, remember to put questions into the Q&A so I can ask them at the end of today’s session. And our first question for you all is, what are the downsides of AI, or the use of AI that is most negative right now in college admissions?
00:00:57 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Great, well, thank you for that question, Maya, and I’ll go ahead and kick off our conversation. So, I’ve been with Carnegie Mellon University for 17 years now, and have had the opportunity to do a lot of work with colleagues at other institutions. So, in answering this question, I’m going to try to wear my Carnegie Mellon hat, but also just put on my admission officer hat a little bit for you as well. I think one of the
00:01:21 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: biggest pitfalls of overuse of artificial intelligence in the college application process.
00:01:28 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: is that students lose some of their voice and their authenticity and their storytelling. I think there’s this really common misconception
00:01:36 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: that the application is exclusively about us trying to evaluate and judge a student’s academic potential, right? So they look at an essay, for example, as a writing assignment, that I’m going to be going through it with this red pen, and grading, and looking for dangling participles, and misplaced modifiers, and the complexity of sentences, and how deep into the thesaurus they go
00:02:00 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: For, for great synonyms.
00:02:03 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And that’s not the point at times in the application. The point can also be getting to know you, hearing your voice, envisioning who you might be as a community member, as a roommate, as a lab mate, as a classmate.
00:02:19 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And an over-reliance on AI at times can add some of the polish that I think students perceive is our focus, but at the cost of losing some of that authenticity, and that voice, and that consistency across the application, where
00:02:38 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: essays and recommendations and activities have these common threads that tell a story about who you are and who you might be at my campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or on another campus at the institution that you ultimately end up looking at. So we’ll talk, I’m sure, about some positive use cases and a lot more about AI in the process. It’s not a
00:03:02 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: you know, net negative by any means, but an over-reliance, I think you lose a little bit.
00:03:10 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: The second point that I’ll make, and this is with my broader admission officer hat on.
00:03:14 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: is, one of the beautiful things about American higher education is that because we’re so decentralized, there’s going to be a campus for you. We have all found our own ways of doing things. We have unique cultures, we have unique academic offerings, unique processes. One of the most frustrating things about American higher education is that we all have our unique ways of doing things. And that means when it comes to AI and the application process, we’re also all going to have
00:03:38 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: have unique policies. And there may be some places that are going to be a lot more restrictive in
00:03:45 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: how much reliance on AI they’ll allow in the application. So that’s another pitfall, is if you’re applying at places that might be running some sort of AI checkers, or where you’re having to, you know, certify that you’re not using AI at all in the process, you want to make sure that you’re paying attention to
00:04:03 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: is this work product something that was influenced by AI? Might that turn up at some point in the process? And then you’re gonna find a lot of other places, like my own, where
00:04:12 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: We’re saying the work product needs to be yours at the end of the day. AI’s a tool, we’re not telling you you can’t use it. But that wide array of approaches can also make the landscape maybe a little more challenging to navigate at times.
00:04:30 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, I think… I think those are some…
00:04:32 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): great overall points, and I agree very much.
00:04:36 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): With what Justin’s saying about the U.S. format for
00:04:43 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): how college admissions is done. It is echoed in a lot of… some other places around the world, but I do think that
00:04:51 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Broadly speaking, colleges here are… Committed to holistic admissions and committed to students being able to
00:05:01 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Not necessarily know where they’re going.
00:05:06 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): In terms of their major or their primary areas of study, but see college as an opportunity to explore.
00:05:13 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And so, I do think that
00:05:16 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): When we, as we’re talking to different colleges and… about this subject, you know, one of those ways where students get to really express themselves is through the essay, and so…
00:05:29 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Until schools find ways that they can, better adapt.
00:05:36 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): other ways of understanding you. There’s a little bit of, I think, a pulling back, or a we have to do more checking to make sure that all the different lenses through which a school looks at you are aligned. And Pioneer is
00:05:51 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): very much the same way. I mean, in a certain regard.
00:05:54 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): anywhere where you’re preparing an essay, or you’re preparing essays for, you know, that describe you and your relation to something you’re applying for, if you’re not doing it right.
00:06:09 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): You know, in real time, but you’re actually having a lot of opportunities.
00:06:14 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): You know, you… you have the advantage of,
00:06:18 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): being… being able to… even before AI, you could have had a lot of people looking at your essays and a lot of reviews of it and things like that.
00:06:30 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): we have Pioneer… at Pioneer, one of the big things we do is usually, for about 80% of the students who apply into the Research Institute and in our Global Problem Solving Institute, we do conduct real-time interviews that have been designed to sort of
00:06:47 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Better determine the student… the student’s,
00:06:52 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): applicability in person, you know? But that’s… that’s something hard when you have as many applicants as a Carnegie Mellon does, or… or other large institutions, and so I think the… the negative, if there’s a case of that, is just that… that sort of sense of how, before the
00:07:10 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): application process can overall adapt within the current structures we have. How do we make sure that we can feel confident about the authenticity of students’ work and thinking in those applications?
00:07:25 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): I think that’s really important. I think both of you touched on some of the major concerns that face AI and how you can avoid over-reliance on AI. I’m curious what reliance on AI might look like. What are some of the upsides of artificial intelligence in the application process, as students consider when and where to use it?
00:07:46 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Absolutely, Maya, and there, I think, certainly are some positives in my mind, and if I can maybe zoom out just a little bit from the application process and broaden my response to the college search process. And the reason that I say that is I think even before you reach the decision to apply to a campus.
00:08:05 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: there’s a lot of research that you’ve gotta do, right? You’ve gotta think about
00:08:09 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: academic or artistic alignment? Are your interests going to be served by the curricular opportunities of a campus? You’ve got to think about cultural and community alignment.
00:08:21 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: it’s really important to you that you have access to a strong artistic community, even if you’re majoring in something technical. Does that campus have that artistic community, or does the surrounding city have that artistic community that is going to bring you meaning and allow you to thrive?
00:08:40 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: As you go to do all of that research, there are a ton of resources available to you, right? You may be working with a school counselor, a college counselor, there are online resources, like the College Board and Niche, but AI has, I think, become a great research tool that you can use as well.
00:08:59 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: To say, can you help me generate a list of colleges that fit these characteristics? Or, I’ve found I really like this college, can you help recommend other similar places? And if you use it as almost that…
00:09:12 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: kind of research assistant riding a sidecar with you in that college search, I think it can help you be more efficient in some of the research that you’re doing, and beginning to narrow your list and decide
00:09:24 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: which places do I maybe want to go to a virtual tour? Or do I want to travel to to check out the campus? Or do I want to pick up the phone and go talk to an admission officer or a professor at?
00:09:34 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: So, it’s got some real power early in the process. And then I think as we get to the application process, in some ways, AI, to build on an observation Matthew made, I think has been
00:09:47 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: A potential leveling of the playing field, in that we have known for years, as long as there have been essays and applications, there were resources out there to help students that had resources write their essay.
00:10:07 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Ghostwriters are a thing, not only in the college admission process, but, you know, I can remember when I was an undergraduate, there were websites you could go to and say, I need a paper on X, Y, and Z by, you know, A date, and you can hire a ghostwriter.
00:10:22 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And there have always been tools out there that could be abused, and that is no different with AI.
00:10:29 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: But there have also always been tools out there that could be leveraged in responsible, positive ways.
00:10:38 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And right now, in our current moment.
00:10:40 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: access to some AI tools is fairly equitable. Is it gonna stay that way? I think that’s a question we’re asking ourselves a lot. You know, as these tools monetized, as paid versions get much better than the free versions, how long will it remain a tool for access?
00:11:00 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: But for right now, I think about the student
00:11:03 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: at a high school where the school counselor might have a 2,000 to 1 caseload, and… or they’re the first in their family to apply to a four-year college, that…
00:11:14 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: 10 years ago, might have been writing that essay all on their own, and never receiving any feedback. Well, you can go put that into a GPT and say, summarize my essay back to me in 3 sentences, or in 4 bullet points. And you can get a sense of, is the story that I’m trying to tell
00:11:32 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: what is coming back to me? And if not, what might I want to rework so that the story is the story I’m trying to tell, right? It can be that coach, it can be that feedback. And at a place like Carnegie Mellon, you know, we’re not telling you you can’t do that.
00:11:48 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Now, if you go unprompted, I need a 400-word essay on why engineering is the field I want to study, that’s a problem. You know, we’re not going to get your voice, it’s not going to be authentic, but again, it’s something kind of riding sidecar and giving you feedback. I think there can be really positive use cases to the tool.
00:12:08 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, I actually hadn’t…
00:12:10 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): you know, in preparing for this, I hadn’t even really thought back to the point about the selection of the colleges a student might consider applying to, but I think that’s a great point, because when
00:12:21 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): I’ve interacted with students over the years, like, I see that they tend to have this very strong, like, last
00:12:28 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): question-asked bias, you know? It’s like there’s so many different things that have you…
00:12:35 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): You… that… that you consider when applying
00:12:39 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): to, to a school, or to the schools you’ll apply to, right? And…
00:12:45 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): It’s very hard to kind of put those all into a framework that would kind of help you
00:12:51 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): amalgamate all those different ideas into one thing. So you may have the Fisk College Guide, or you may have… boy, I’m dating myself a little bit, maybe everybody… whatever the online tools and, you know, and international students may have different tools, and
00:13:05 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): different access to counselors, but kind of it often tends to be… like, I’ve seen a lot of students, they go to campus, they see something that really influenced themselves, then they say to the… on a tour, and then they say, like, well, do these other schools have that? And it’s very hard to actually…
00:13:20 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): no… You know, it’s very hard to not be sucked into, this is really important to me.
00:13:27 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): and not really unweight so many of the other things. And so, I do think that
00:13:33 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): AI allows you to kind of look at a broad group of schools and research and kind of provide a weighted average to the different things that you really want, so that you can consider your college search more holistically. I think that’s a great point.
00:13:50 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): I, I think the, the, the idea of,
00:13:54 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Leveling the playing field is certainly… it’s not only, you know, whether you’ve paid for some kind of extra service or advocate, but… but also just…
00:14:06 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): you know, as Justin’s pointing out, the different kinds of caseloads and how much you get from your school, or if the experience of your counselor, if you’re looking at, you know, in an international space,
00:14:19 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And so, I think that that opportunity to have coaching, essentially.
00:14:27 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): That’s relatively equitable in terms of price.
00:14:31 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Is a pretty great thing. The only… the biggest challenge is, okay, that coach doesn’t say, oh, I don’t… you can’t ask me to do this, right? Or this school doesn’t let you do that, right? And so that really becomes up to you, and it becomes up to the school to be very, very clear
00:14:48 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): About what’s permissible and what’s not.
00:14:51 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): But a little bit like the test-optional situation, when everything went test-optional, and so you kind of had to figure out a way to…
00:14:58 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): approach my test-taking strategy.
00:15:03 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): with…
00:15:05 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): a lot of different schools that had different policies. This even more so, I think Justin makes a great point that, you know, you have to be sure you’re staying within the guidelines of the most conservative
00:15:17 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Universities you might be applying to as you look at the whole list.
00:15:23 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): as someone who applied to college during COVID, I didn’t even consider the effect that AI now has on the college search process. Like, during that time, you couldn’t tour, so everything was you doing work on the websites. I, like, moved into certain websites, I feel like you’re looking at the things that really differentiate colleges, so it’s really important that everyone is making use, I think, of AI tools in finding programs that you might not know
00:15:48 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): look for on their websites. And also things like clubs and activities and people to reach out to. And oftentimes that’s not always evident when you’re just clicking, through an information session or something of that nature. I definitely appreciate that point.
00:16:04 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): I’m curious to hear from all of you, do admissions offices, both admissions programs like Pioneer and the broader, university process at Carnegie Mellon, have concerns about AI use that they vocalize to professors and different admissions officers? Are those things even being discussed? And could admissions offices adopt measures similar to how colleges address AI use in academic performance?
00:16:30 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: great and timely questions there, Maya, so…
00:16:33 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Right before we started this session, Matthew and I were actually chatting about the National Association for College Admission Counseling Conference, which is coming up in just a couple of weeks. It’s one of the largest gatherings of college admission officers, school-based and community counselors, independent educational consultants, and our important partners.
00:16:54 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: in this work, folks, like the good folks at Pioneer, that come together, and…
00:16:59 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: There are going to be sessions at this conference, I guarantee you, about artificial intelligence. So, to your question of, is it a point of conversation?
00:17:08 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Absolutely, it’s a point of conversation. There are… anytime you get a large group of folks together doing this work, AI is probably going to come up at some point. I think we’re at a point that different institutions have different comfort levels with their
00:17:27 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: own institutional adoption of AI.
00:17:31 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And with kind of their philosophical feelings about the use of AI in education at this point.
00:17:37 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: So there’s far from a single standard out there, and Matthew alluded to the need to understand, like, what are the most conservative policies amongst the schools on your list, and I think that’s really good advice, because there’s not a great deal of consistency.
00:17:52 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: It’s also very much a conversation on our campuses, and in a lot of different layers, right? Carnegie Mellon, we offered the first Bachelor of Science degree in artificial intelligence in the country. So, we talk about it a lot from the point of how do we
00:18:09 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: teach AI? How do we
00:18:12 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: foster a strong and ethical sense of the creation and the maintenance of AI and the next generation of tech leaders, but we also talk about its impacts on our campus community. And for a lot of our faculty right now, what they’re working on is an understanding of to what degree and to which tools is AI usage appropriate in their various classrooms, right? There may be
00:18:37 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: spaces where…
00:18:41 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: AI use is not appropriate to specific assignments, or to specific topics, or to specific classrooms. And others where learning how to use it as a tool is going to be
00:18:53 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: absolutely essential to a student being prepared and marketable for their career, right? So, I think even with individual communities, you’re not going to find single policy statements on AI usage.
00:19:08 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: if you are, that statement is probably not nearly nuanced enough to serve the entirety of its community, right? So it’s an ongoing conversation. I know that my response here has maybe been a little meandering and not giving you clear, bright lines, but that’s somewhat, I think, intentional in that
00:19:27 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: This is a tool that is very much…
00:19:31 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: changing, I think, the way that we think about work, and the way that we think about education. You know, to draw a parallel example that I do not think is a perfect example, I think it’s a flawed example in many ways, but it’s still illustrative.
00:19:46 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: My mother-in-law was a math teacher for her entire career, and going through education was learning at a time that, you know, really complex, like, scientific calculators were just hitting the market. And there was this concern, well, the scientific calculator’s the end of math. No one’s ever gonna know how to do math again.
00:20:05 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: we’ve figured out how to teach people how to do math with calculators, right? And we’re facing that same kind of inflection point right now in a lot of other spaces. And while it’s not a one-to-one comparison.
00:20:16 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: I’m confident we’re gonna figure out how to teach people how to think, how to reason, how to write in the age of AI, in the same way we figured out how to teach people how to do math in the age of the calculator.
00:20:28 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, I think that’s… that’s such a great point. We’ve… we actually… I think that most,
00:20:35 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): if we just think about the pedagogical side and not the application side, I think a lot of the
00:20:41 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): A lot of… classroom professors and teachers are thinking first defensively. How do I make sure that
00:20:51 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): that the work is authentic, and I can trust the work, and… But I think we’ll…
00:20:58 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Move toward a world where we start to think of, once we kind of have that established,
00:21:04 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): You know, where do we need to build new skills, new competencies?
00:21:09 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And I…
00:21:10 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): I expect that the college application process then may, in the medium term, migrate towards those questions, right? Because there’s…
00:21:21 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): The… the need for…
00:21:24 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): higher education to instill some of those key values of… not values, key competencies of things like critical thinking. And, you know, critical thinking, that’s just such an overblown word, I think, a lot of times, but if you look at the World Economic Forum’s,
00:21:43 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Their report on the jobs of the future.
00:21:48 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): The… the focus, the need to focus on,
00:21:54 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): on analytical thinking, on collaboration, on the ability to have, you know, to understand something well enough yourself that you can have empathy to talk to different stakeholders, or think about different stakeholders, and think about how those things affect them. These are things that are probably going to get more emphasis.
00:22:12 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And I suspect it’s possible that the college application process over time may change to kind of measure
00:22:21 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): These things, and how you as an applicant, or one as an applicant, positions themselves in that kind of world.
00:22:28 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): So I, I think there’s a lot of positives to it, but there’s always, you know.
00:22:34 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Innovation is often disruptive, and so there’s always the initial disruption that comes through as different colleges try to,
00:22:44 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Amalgamate this technology into their… their process.
00:22:49 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): As someone who was horrible at mathematics, I’m very grateful for the scientific calculator.
00:22:56 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): And it’s, evolution in my education. I want to start by touching on something that Matthew left off of.
00:23:03 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): What are ways that there’s a de-emphasis on essays in the application process? Are there newer strategies, like prioritizing recommendation letters, different forms of interviews? And how are we looking at the skills that AI might not readily replace, in a different way?
00:23:23 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Absolutely. I also was not the best mathematician, so around my third semester of college calc, I was very much ready to be done with mathematics as well, so that resonates.
00:23:38 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: this is one of those questions where I’m gonna begin by saying, it depends. I always joke that anytime you put me in front of an audience to talk about college admission, at some point I need to say, I wish I had a t-shirt that said, it depends. And that is because…
00:23:52 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: every institution is responding in their own and unique ways. So there are absolutely institutions that are going to be de-emphasizing the essay in their process, whether that means that they’re still asking for it, but they are putting greater emphasis in other areas, or they might be replacing it with an interview, or with a short
00:24:16 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: I haven’t heard of anywhere going to…
00:24:20 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: live, like, timed writing yet, but I’ve certainly been in rooms where it’s been talked about, almost like the Blue Book of…
00:24:28 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: you write your essay in the room, there being a way to gather a quick short answer response in a timed way, in a more moderated way. So there’s conversations about it, no doubt.
00:24:40 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): But I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush, because there are also institutions, and I would say that Carnegie Mellon remains one of them, that continues to emphasize the essay in very important ways.
00:24:52 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: The essay, as I alluded to earlier, it’s about getting to know you and hear your story, and it’s about its continuity and its consistency with other areas of the application. And so…
00:25:04 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: I think that’s a really important distinction, that…
00:25:09 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: for most applicants, we always get a couple that maybe there’s a whole lot of information about them out there in the public sphere, but for most applicants, there’s not a ton about you out there on the internet, right? So if you go and you ask an AI to write a 500-word essay on Abraham Lincoln, there’s a lot of material it can use.
00:25:26 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: But if you wanted to write a 500-word essay about you, you probably have to feed the information to it. And you have to feed an immense amount of information to it. And the amount of time it’s going to take you to feed and train that AI on that information…
00:25:40 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: It’s probably gonna far exceed the amount of time that it’s gonna take you to, like, write that initial draft of the essay yourself for the story to have continuity with your activities, with your recommendations, with the rest of your application.
00:25:53 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Now, if we revisit this panel in 5 years, AI’s gonna be in a different spot, and I might be giving you a very different answer. But at least for today.
00:26:01 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: I think the AI… the essay still plays a really important role, and it’s because of that emphasis on the underlying characteristics of the student. In what ways might you collaborate and communicate effectively? And what passions do you exhibit? Are you showing an ability to persevere to goal completion?
00:26:20 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: exhibiting care for others in your community and pro-social motivation is a theme that connects to other areas. And that focus in the essay, I think, helps to keep it pertinent for many institutions in the age of AI.
00:26:37 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, I would just add that, I mean, I think that every institution that we’ve looked at, including our own.
00:26:43 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Are looking for ways to… are implementing some ways to ensure that they can
00:26:52 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): rely on the authenticity of the application. And for some of them, it just means we’re gonna take what we always did.
00:27:00 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And emphasize ensuring
00:27:04 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): That the veracity of the material, is shown through the continuity of the different pieces of the application.
00:27:12 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Others are, doing more, you know, additional or specific things, whether that’s
00:27:18 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): you know, we’ve seen that, at least Brown and Princeton and Amherst seem to be talking about requiring or being able to ask for graded papers, you know, things that kind of connect back to something that they can trust being authentic, but I think the key word there is authenticity, and actually.
00:27:38 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Not only in terms of making sure that what they’re getting is verifiable, but actually as advice to anyone who’s applying to college, like, there’s no benefit to not being authentic, and if you’re using
00:27:55 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): If you are allowed to use artificial intelligence to whatever extent the guideline of the institution provides, and…
00:28:04 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): You know, and you do choose to do so, what you’re really trying to do is just better express your most authentic self.
00:28:11 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): if you’re… You know, if…
00:28:15 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): as Justin said, he’s not looking for dangling participles, right? And so, if the AI piece of it, you know, helps to just ensure you have a, you know, the language is clean.
00:28:26 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): But it’s not exaggerating who you are, or trying to paint who you are as what you think the college will want. First of all, those things will come out with a continuity problem.
00:28:38 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And second of all, it’s not good for you even if you were admitted to such an institution, because that institution’s trying to understand you and admit you as part of that community. So I think…
00:28:49 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): We are increasingly talking about the ideas of
00:28:54 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Thinking about how… how you organically express
00:28:58 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): yourself. And it’s not like there’s only one true you, or there’s only one true way to talk about it, but it should really be you, either way.
00:29:08 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, that actually ties to exactly a question that a person has asked in the chat. Someone is curious what ways they can go about thinking how to show their personal, authentic self, and what counts as AI use. Is it grammar checking? Is it, running Google searches using certain tools? Like, what does that look like?
00:29:27 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): In this new world.
00:29:31 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Let me start with the first question about your authentic self, and Maya, hold me accountable to answering the second question, because if I lose that in the thread, I want to make sure that I do.
00:29:41 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: I think to center your story and your authentic self.
00:29:47 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: is a little unnatural at times for a 17 or an 18-year-old, right? Most of your writing assignments in secondary school are not asking you to write about yourself, and it can feel a little unnatural, maybe it feels a little, like, bragging.
00:30:01 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: But the story being about you is really quite important. And whatever feedback loops you have, be that an independent educational consultant, be that your school or college counselor, a favorite English teacher, a best friend, a parent, or a GPT,
00:30:20 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: that can help you summarize back your story, and whether or not you’re the focus of that story, I think is a great feedback loop. Oftentimes, because you know your story, it can be very easy to fill in the blanks that someone else might not see.
00:30:40 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: To give you an illustration, I could give you a 650-word Common App essay on spending time with my grandpa growing up. My grandpa was one of my best friends as a kid, and a hero of mine.
00:30:51 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: If I were to give that essay to a friend of mine in the admission office, and they read it and go, man, Justin, I wish I’d met your grandpa, he sounds like a great guy.
00:31:01 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: What that feedback says to me is I wrote about my grandpa and not about me.
00:31:06 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: But if I tell you a really similar story.
00:31:08 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And I bring it around to a conclusion about how that time with my grandpa, it instilled hobbies that I’ve remained really active with. It’s why I love gardening. And that gardening helps center me. When things are just tough in the world, when I face a challenge, when I’m feeling down, I go out, I work in my garden.
00:31:27 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And I feel at peace, and I feel this sense of kinship with my grandpa, and it keeps me centered, and it keeps me motivated.
00:31:35 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Now you learned about me, right? And the takeaway might be.
00:31:39 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: when Justin gets to that third semester of calc, and he’s leaning on that scientific calculator, and it’s getting tough, he’s got some coping mechanisms, right? He’s learned how to persevere. And guess what? His roommate is probably going to learn a little bit of something about gardening.
00:31:53 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: I became a part of the story. You similarly want to make sure that you are a part of the story, and thinking about the way that that story in the essay
00:32:04 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: fits into all the other pieces. And that’s a theme we keep touching upon, but it’s an important one worth emphasizing again.
00:32:11 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Is it telling a story more in depth?
00:32:15 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Or a story that maybe hasn’t already been told in the same way elsewhere. It shouldn’t just repeat or summarize your activities, but go in deeper into something, or complement a story that you know your recommender is telling. That’s a very important part of the authenticity of it.
00:32:33 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And then my… the second question of… of what counts as AI use.
00:32:39 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: man, you gotta ask institutions, you gotta read their policies, because I don’t think there is a definition of what AI use is. You know, you brought up grammar checks. Well, rudimentary grammar checks were coming on the market when I was in middle school. I remember when the little squiggly red and blue lines showed up in Microsoft Word.
00:32:58 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And that was a very rudimentary AI application of grammar checks. Now, grammar checks today are a heck of a lot more than that, but it’s been around.
00:33:08 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: And certainly if you’re applying at a place that is going to run every piece of writing through an AI checker, there’s been some research to show that AI checkers sometimes give false positives on things like
00:33:21 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Extensive use of grammar checks, where maybe it didn’t do the writing, but it altered your voice enough and in consistent enough ways to other alterations that it could show up.
00:33:34 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: So I think you do want to follow up, you do want to get a sense of what our institution’s doing. In my mind, a grammar checker is not.
00:33:44 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: problem. Like, that is not something I’m looking for in reviewing an essay, but I’m sure I have colleagues around the country that might caution you a little bit more within their own processes.
00:33:58 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, I think… I think Justin, I don’t have anything to add to that. That was well… well described.
00:34:04 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): Amazing. Thank you both so much for joining us. I encourage everyone to go to our closing for today, summit, but it was beyond informative, and I super appreciate all of the comments we made. AI is constantly changing education, and I know you all are probably worried about it, but there are really great upsides if we use it correctly.
00:34:23 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Thank you so much.
00:34:24 Maya El-Sharif (Pioneer Academics): Thank you so much, everyone.
00:34:25 Justin J. Mohney | Carnegie Mellon: Bye. Thanks for having me. Take care, everyone.
00:34:31 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): Hello, everyone. I hope you’re all doing well. I’m here for the closing part of it, so for the closing of today’s session, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can stay right here, and I will go ahead and wrap this up.
00:34:44 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): Thank you all attendees, for being here today. Without you, we do not have the Co-Curricular Summit, and so this is the final panel in the 4th Annual Pioneer Co-Curricular Summit. So, I just want to thank, really quickly, all of the panelists and speakers who dedicated their time, the colleges and universities and programs that came to the fairs earlier in the day for sharing their insights on leadership, education.
00:35:04 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And everything in between.
00:35:05 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And then again, I want to thank you, the audience, for being attentive throughout the sessions, asking amazing questions, and just making today possible. We do not have this co-curricular fair without you.
00:35:14 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And so, on that vein, we are proud to announce that we will be holding the 5th annual Pioneer Co-Curricular Summit next year on September 19th, 2026. And so, we hope to see you there next year. You can circle your calendars now, so you don’t forget when it comes up next year.
00:35:29 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): To that vein, we do ask for your feedback on ways of making this summit better for you for future years, and so things you liked, didn’t like as much, would like to have seen, and so we ask for you to complete a survey just to give us your feedback on your experience here today at the summit. And so to do that, if you go back to the main summit page.
00:35:48 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): There is the lounge button in that top ribbon.
00:35:51 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): Within that lounge page, you will see one of the buttons on the side that says, fill out a survey. That survey is that feedback survey, so you can give the feedback to Pioneer. We look forward to hearing the feedback and hearing what you have to say so we can improve the summit going forward.
00:36:06 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And so, second to last thing I have is the results of the leaderboard for today. So I will be reading out the top 10 point scores going from, the 10th rank to the first place. And so, 10th place, we have Olivia Elmore Chichelnisky.
00:36:26 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And I apologize in advance for all of these, if there is a mispronunciation of your name. In ninth place, we have Ahmed Faithi.
00:36:34 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): In 8th place, we have Yassine El-WaKil.
00:36:38 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): In seventh place, we have Mohamed Safay Eldin.
00:36:42 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): In sixth place, we have Jinchuan Luan.
00:36:45 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): In fifth place, we have Ahmed Hassan.
00:36:49 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): In fourth place, we have Abdel Rahman Eldid.
00:36:54 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): Excuse me. In third place, we have Ahmed Mohammed.
00:36:58 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): In second place, we have Jess Cooper, and in first place, we have Mohammed L-D.
00:37:05 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And so, thank you all for those top 10 places, you will receive a copy of Diana Kander, our keynote speaker’s newest book, Get Curious and Grow, as well as a $30 electronic gift card.
00:37:16 Ryan Dwyer (Pioneer Academics): And with that, that is all we have today at the summit. Again, I appreciate your time, and I appreciate your time in being here, I appreciate your interactions throughout the summit, and we look forward to seeing you next year. Thank you.
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