College Essay Research Articles

Adapting to the AI Era: ChatGPT in the Classroom

The emergence of ChatGPT, a conversational AI developed by OpenAI, has raised profound questions about its impact on the traditional university experience. This article addresses the pervasive discourse surrounding ChatGPT by investigating the actual capabilities of AI writing at the undergraduate level. To study the strengths and limitations of AI in the classroom, we conducted a survey experiment involving faculty assessment of essays generated by ChatGPT. Contrary to concerns of diminishing academic rigor and standards, our findings suggest that ChatGPT’s effectiveness is influenced by user knowledge, indicating potential for symbiotic integration into pedagogical approaches. Rather than spell the end of the college essay, we suggest that ChatGPT offers opportunities to open discussions about information literacy and verification of information. For universities, our study suggests revising university AI-usage policies and incorporating AI into teaching and learning objectives.

A Study on the Effects of Reflective Writing of a College Essay Contest : Focusing on Interviews with Award-winning Students

A Study on the Effects of Reflective Writing of a College Essay Contest : Focusing on Interviews with Award-winning Students

Can you spot the bot? Identifying AI-generated writing in college essays

The release of ChatGPT in 2022 has generated extensive speculation about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the capacity of institutions for higher learning to achieve their central missions of promoting learning and certifying knowledge. Our main questions were whether people could identify AI-generated text and whether factors such as expertise or confidence would predict this ability. The present research provides empirical data to inform these speculations through an assessment given to a convenience sample of 140 college instructors and 145 college students (Study 1) as well as to ChatGPT itself (Study 2). The assessment was administered in an online survey and included an AI Identification Test which presented pairs of essays: In each case, one was written by a college student during an in-class exam and the other was generated by ChatGPT. Analyses with binomial tests and linear modeling suggested that the AI Identification Test was challenging: On average, instructors were able to guess which one was written by ChatGPT only 70% of the time (compared to 60% for students and 63% for ChatGPT). Neither experience with ChatGPT nor content expertise improved performance. Even people who were confident in their abilities struggled with the test. ChatGPT responses reflected much more confidence than human participants despite performing just as poorly. ChatGPT responses on an AI Attitude Assessment measure were similar to those reported by instructors and students except that ChatGPT rated several AI uses more favorably and indicated substantially more optimism about the positive educational benefits of AI. The findings highlight challenges for scholars and practitioners to consider as they navigate the integration of AI in education.

The College Essay is Not Dead

Comparing and reflecting on the structures and outcomes of research projects for both a required first-year writing course, Writing as Inquiry, and an elective advanced history seminar, Popular Culture and the Scientific Revolution, which the author taught simultaneously at NYU Shanghai during the Spring 2023 semester, yields several strategies that instructors can implement to help deter students from using ChatGPT, and other AI tools, to generate their research essays. These strategies include making essays one component of larger scaffolded assignments in which students are explicit about their research process, devoting class time to brainstorming and discussion at the beginning of, and key points throughout, a project, providing periodic feedback from the instructor and classmates, requiring students to utilize available university resources, such as libraries and academic resource centers, and intervening to create additional personalized scaffolding for students who are struggling. By doing so, students can continue to gain the information literacy, critical analysis, and organizational skills—as well as the ability to express themselves clearly—that writing college essays provides.

Student Perceptions of ChatGPT Use in a College Essay Assignment: Implications for Learning, Grading, and Trust in Artificial Intelligence

Student Perceptions of ChatGPT Use in a College Essay Assignment: Implications for Learning, Grading, and Trust in Artificial Intelligence

Aren’t Research Questions and Hypotheses Indispensable for Literature Research, too?

Many English literature researchers in India commonly operate under the assumption that they lack a specific research methodology exclusive to literature studies, apart from what is outlined in the regularly updated MLA Handbook. Consequently, their dissertations often resemble lengthy college essays divided into five chapters, with limited emphasis on the Introduction and Conclusion chapters. The concluding section is routinely labeled as ‘Summation.’ These researchers typically overlook identifying knowledge gaps, even during the literature review phase, and often neglect the framing of research questions and formulation of hypotheses. There seems to be a prevailing belief that literary research is inherently distinct, exempting them from adopting methodologies employed in other disciplines. This paper explores the reasons behind the development of an anti-methodological stance among literature researchers, utilizing a structured questionnaire administered to PhD holders in literature. The findings suggest that this attitude stems from a steadfast adherence to the MLA Handbook, which prioritizes documentation procedures over methodological considerations. The paper recommends that literature scholars should embrace books and stylesheets designed for general research as the fundamental objectives of research in any discipline are the pursuit of truth and the appropriate means to achieve it.

Trauma drama: The trouble with competitive victimhood

Writing a college-application essay has become a rite of passage for high-school seniors in the United States, one whose importance has expanded over time due to an increasingly competitive admissions process. Various commentators have noted the disturbing evolution of these essays over the years, with an ever-greater emphasis placed on obstacles overcome and traumas survived. How have we gotten to the point where college-application essays are all too frequently competitive-victimhood displays? Colleges have an understandable interest in the disadvantages their applicants may have suffered, but this interest – and the awareness of it among both applicants and their advisors – has led to a ‘race to the bottom’: in order to thrive (or even survive) in a particular competitive context, participants are forced to continuously lower relevant standards in a game of one-upmanship. With college essays, the competition is among high-school seniors for admission, the one-upmanship is an ever-escalating effort to persuade admission committees of one’s greater disadvantage, and the relevant standards being lowered are honesty, privacy, and dignity – or so I shall argue. As we will see, this particular race to the bottom imposes unequal costs on certain groups and has implications stretching well beyond collegiate admissions.

Stories worth sharing: high school students from diverse backgrounds tell their stories

Abstract This qualitative case study examined the effect of writing sessions, conducted at a university literacy festival, on the construction of college admission essays. Sessions were conducted by authors of multicultural young adult literature and university writing center staff and students. Each session focused on helping 132 high school students from Title 1 schools use their voice to share their social and cultural experiences. Essays and reflective responses from participants, authors, university writing center staff, and university freshman mentors were analyzed. Analysis of essays revealed four themes: overcoming hardship, involvement in academic and extracurricular programs, cultural and ethnic identity, and positive role models; analysis of reflections revealed three themes: an increase in confidence in writing, a new understanding that participants’ stories could affect others, and barriers to attending college. Findings indicated that author and university writing sessions were effective in promoting writing strategies for under-supported high school students constructing college essays.

Help me with my college essay

Help me with my college essay

A comparative study of the phrase frames used in the essays of native and nonnative English students

A phrase frame (i.e., p-frame) is a type of recurrent discontinuous multiword sequence. So far, many studies have investigated the p-frames used in written texts in various genres, disciplines, and registers. However, few previous p-frame studies have attempted a comparative analysis of the p-frames used by native and nonnative English students. This scarcity prevents us from obtaining a full understanding of phraseological competence development in nonnative English learners. Using a corpus-driven approach, the current study identified and compared the 5-word p-frames used by native and nonnative English students in their college essays. The results showed no statistically significant difference between these two groups with respect to the types and tokens of p-frames used in their essays. However, significant intergroup differences could be observed when the predictability, variability, structural characteristics, and discourse functions of the identified p-frames were considered. These findings on the use of p-frames by native and nonnative English students could complement the comparative studies of recurrent continuous multiword sequences and thus advance our understanding of phraseological competence development in nonnative English learners.

Factors why people buy college essays

Factors why people buy college essays

Feature: The Time to Write: Teaching Second-Semester Composition through Reflection on Informal Evaluations

This study documents the author’s experience reflecting on eight semesters of informal student evaluations of teaching in the process of updating his teaching methods for second-semester composition. He finds that reflective teaching practices provide a powerful methodology for engaging with the opinions of two-year college students, which can lead to a more productive focus on writing college essays in the composition classroom.

Not One Space for Y

I see Y reading the comments her teacher left on her paper. She uses Google Translate to add perfectly spelled words clarifying a detail about her grandmother’s aspiration to become literate. At least this is how I imagine Y to have prepared her college essay. I have not met Y. But I am certain that she never expected her writing to be the focus of a teachers’ planning meeting.

Abandoning the College Essay: Teaching Students to Write Like Lawyers

Abandoning the College Essay: Teaching Students to Write Like Lawyers

Measuring intercultural knowledge and competence in college essays: Does a performance-based rubric have construct validity?

College mission statements describe their belief that a meaningful college experience includes curricular and co-curricular activities that challenge students to develop socially-responsible attitudes and actions toward others. This charge highlights the dynamic role of the university in society and the need for valid measures to evaluate mission effectiveness and inform programmatic decision-making. In response to this need, research regarding the use of rubrics for rating performance-based assignments (PBAs) such as college essays is growing (McConnell et al., 2019). This study explored the construct validity and reliability of a performance-based rubric, the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric (Rhodes, 2010), the items of which are posited to measure elements of Social Responsibility (SR). Using data from PBAs embedded within general-education courses and scored by multi-disciplinary faculty, we evaluated aspects of construct validity and reliability of the rubric. Overall, our results provide evidence that this rubric has favorable statistical properties that lend support to its usage.

Expressive innovation: How first-year college students introduced emoticons to the curriculum

For the initiated, college may be remembered as a care-free and playful time. However, for contemporary college students the transition to college is challenging with only 1 in 3 returning for their second year of study, and the challenges are even greater for first-generation and low-income students. The interactive digital platform of the current study invited low-income first-year students to write about and reflect upon their transition to college. It was through the higher order cognitive process of writing, which involved deciding which words, symbols, and punctuation to use to express a particular thought to a particular audience, that the students made-sense of their experiences. Our analyses detail how students integrated new approaches for communicating their thoughts in writing and how these techniques changed over time. We show how first-year students used the affordances of the keyboard and an interactive blog to create a reflective and supportive digital writing style somewhere between the formality of the college essay and the freewheeling social media post. The emerging playful style was marked by the introduction of computer-mediated communication (CMC) cues typical of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, including emoticons and emojis, hashtags, repeated capital letters, repeated punctuation, and abbreviations such as lol, to the college course context. A path analysis of 209 blog posts and 161 comments over four time points, coupled with a qualitative case study showed that students developed their use of CMC cues first on the social level through comments and later on the individual level in their posts. Our analyses show how students integrated CMC cues to communicate humor and critique as they created a new genre of college writing. The social support and the CMC cues were concretely relevant to the students’ development of knowledge and practice of what it meant to write in college and what it meant to become a college student.

Institutional Expectations and Students’ Responses to the College Application Essay

This paper explores inequality along the path to college through an analysis of college admissions essays and institutional documents that shape admissions expectations in the United States. The research considers how successful applicants from two different universities and students who are the first in their families to go to college compared to those who are not, approach the college essay in relation to the presented institutional expectations. The sample consists of institutional materials from two universities, one a small private university and one a large public institution. Institutional materials also include documents from college preparatory agencies (such as Kaplan and Khan Academy). Thirty-five student essays were collected from the same two universities mentioned above. Through values analysis, a narrative analysis method, I ask how students with less exposure to the culture of college (taken for granted knowledge about college that is passed down from families) perform the college essay genre. Findings show that students with less exposure to the culture of college focus more on challenges and narrate less expression of their “true selves” in their college admissions essays. Findings can help stakeholders create a more equitable college admissions process that more clearly illuminates institutional expectations for students.

Writing Boxes: The Reading/Writing Connection Supporting Literacy in the Library

In 1993, I was newly matriculated into a Master’s of Library Science program at Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science. I was employed as a Librarian Trainee II with the Brooklyn Public Library, posted to the Park Slope Branch, in a then mixed-class neighborhood.But I had a dark secret. I couldn’t write. To be clear: the thought of college essays and research papers nauseated me. How was I going to get through graduate school? I barely made it through my undergraduate classes by creatively providing and producing alternative assessment products (anything except turning in a research paper). I was the master at avoiding addressing my writing anxiety.

Descriptive Study On Type and Function of Rebuttal in College Essay : focused on Essays after Debate

Descriptive Study On Type and Function of Rebuttal in College Essay : focused on Essays after Debate

Scaffolds

Scaffolds