Tech-Neill-ogy #55 - 7 July 2024

Your Weekly Guide to Leveraging Technology in College Counseling

Welcome to Tech-Neill-ogy #55!

I’m feeling a fair amount of FOMO in seeing social media posts of friends and colleagues en route to London, Ontario for IACAC. That said, I am enjoying the downtime this summer.

In any case, there is a lot these days on student misuse of AI for essay writing. I cannot find the article I recently read that if you qualify AI misuse under the category of “academic integrity violations,” there has not been an increase in the overall number of incidents; however, the percentage of those from AI has grown sizably. (If anyone has read this research and can locate it, please send it my way!) That being said, from my perspective, the way to combat this is to continue to teach students how to use AI responsibly. I am hopeful that we all can continue to do this heading into the new school year. There are a bunch of good articles this week related to this topic. Enjoy!

With all the talk out there about student misuse of AI for essay writing, I could not help but explore how ChatGPT (and other chatbots like it) could be used in this way. I’ve spent some time recently diving into this space. Here is a prompt I’ve used with various degrees of “success” that has opened my eyes to the possibilities. Before you leap to judgment, take some time to delve into this as well. From where I sit, I feel that we, as college counselors, have an obligation to really understand the potential for use and misuse here.

You are to act as a creative writing instructor, and you will guide me through creating a college application essay. You will begin by asking me to share the prompt I have selected to address, and then you will ask me one question at a time and wait for my replies before asking another, all to seek to push me to flesh out my ideas. Then you will craft a compelling essay of 625 to 650 words. 

My contention: even at its best — and I think this prompt is an example of this! — AI produces really good starting places. I found the structure of most of my trials with this prompt to be simplistic, whereas the content was good. To be clear, I do not intend to share this prompt (or anything like it) with my students, but the exercise exposed me to the world of our students. It is worth some of your time to also explore. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Some previous prompts are shared at this link and on my YouTube channel. However, if you have any great prompts or questions about prompting, send me a note at [email protected].

I hope all of you at IACAC enjoy the conference! For those of you not attending, I hope your summer is going well. IB results came out on Saturday, so I’m wading through a sea of emails, so not as calm a week as I’d like! In any case, see you next week!

Happy counseling,

Jeff