Dartmouth admissions office has no plans to screen applicant essays with third-party AI detectors

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Dartmouth admissions office has no plans to screen applicant essays with third-party AI detectors

A spokesperson for the College did not respond to requests for comment on whether admissions has a formal policy to address artificial intelligence use in application materials

McNutt Hall, home of the College’s Office of Admissions, pictured on Oct. 30.

Dartmouth Admissions does not plan to use artificial intelligence detectors to review admissions essays, according to an Oct. 19 email statement to The Dartmouth from dean of admissions and financial aid Lee Coffin. Coffin added that no applications are read by “third-party vendors” and that an admissions officer “reads each essay.”

A spokesperson for the College did not respond to requests for comment on whether Dartmouth admissions has a formal policy to evaluate potential AI use by applicants. 

Co-founder and chief executive officer of college admissions New Haven based consulting firm InGenius Prep Joel Butterly ’11 wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that “most selective schools still haven’t written” a policy concerning AI use in applications. He pointed to a 2025 survey of over 200 college admissions officers by global education program Kaplan that found 68% of colleges had no policy on using AI in admissions essays. 

The Brown Daily Herald first reported on Oct. 14 that Brown University admissions does not use third-party AI detectors to evaluate applicants’ essays, according to the Brown dean of undergraduate admission Logan Powell. Other Ivy League universities do not have publicly-available policies about using third-party AI detectors during the admissions process; some cite the Common App policy or general institution AI policies when governing AI use in applicant submissions.

The Common Application, a centralized online college admissions platform used by over 1,000 colleges and universities, including Dartmouth, prohibits students from “submitting plagiarized essays or other written or oral material,” including “substantive content or output of an artificial intelligence platform,” according to its website

“Since 2023, the Common App’s fraud policy has treated submitting the substantive output of an AI tool as your own as application fraud,” Butterly wrote. “A fraud finding can get a student blocked from the Common App and reported to every school on their list.”

Fraud reviews in relation to perceived plagiarism are triggered by reports or allegations submitted by a Common App member college or third party, such as students, parents or school counselors. Allegations are reviewed by the Common App legal and operations team

Common App senior public relations specialist Jackson Sternberg wrote that the Common App “does not validate any aspects of student applications” and “does not use any AI detection software.”

Butterly wrote that Dartmouth admission’s “silence” on AI use is “not permission” for applicants to use AI to generate admissions materials. 

“Dartmouth is a good example of the gray zone,” he wrote. “It has no formal undergraduate AI admissions policy, but guests on the admissions dean’s own podcast have repeatedly discouraged using it on applications.”

Dartmouth’s “Admissions Beat” podcast, which is hosted by Coffin and features guest panelists, provides admissions information and guidance for prospective applicants, parents and counselors. In an episode titled “AI Can’t Feel,” vice president of enrollment at St. John’s College Ben Baum said it is important to show “authenticity” throughout an application, which is “the antithesis of AI.”

Despite policies prohibiting AI use, college admissions counselors told The Dartmouth that they have noticed an increase in AI usage by high school students to assist the writing process. Bay Area college counseling company AJ Tutoring college counseling director Karen Warwick said AI usage in essays by her company’s clients has been “less than we anticipated,” but there has been “a range of ways” she has consistently seen students use AI, including editing and brainstorming.

“I think the way that most students use it with essays, in my experience, is they draft something and then look for feedback from an AI platform on what they’ve written,” Warwick said. “It’s more rare to see students use AI to create an entire essay from scratch, but we have occasionally seen instances where students will.”

Warwick said that she emphasizes to her students that it is “more valuable and effective” to use “your own voice” when writing college admissions essays

Butterly wrote his clients’ AI usage in their essays has “increased every cycle,” with students mostly using it to “brainstorm essay topics, outline and tighten drafts.” He recommended that students should treat AI as a “smart study partner” that allows them to “keep the ideas and their voice their own.” The “best uses” of AI he has seen, he said, are students using AI to develop personal passion projects that help set them apart in the application process. 

“One of our students is building a low-cost air pollution sensor,” Butterly wrote. “Her counselors pushed her to use ChatGPT and Claude to draft a parts list that kept each unit under $95. She still had to build it, test it and figure out why the readings were off. That is the right relationship: AI speeds up the boring part, and the student does the thinking.”

Unlike Dartmouth, some colleges have integrated third-party AI tools into admissions to review application essays. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which uses the application management platform Slate for Admissions and Enrollment, previously used the platform’s Reader AI tool to pre-read documents and assign an AI-generated score. However, they ceased using the tool for the 2026-27 application cycle because AI usage in application essays skewed AI essay ratings higher, diminishing the usefulness of the tool, the Daily Tar Heel reported in October. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University pairs one human reader with one AI reader to score essays to speed up the decision making process, according to The Collegiate Times.

Warwick said she tells her students to “plan for the possibility” that college admissions officers may use AI detectors to review applications. Butterly added that he believes many AI detection tools are “unreliable” and can lead to false positives

Butterly added that he expects college admission officers to place more of an emphasis on application components that AI “can’t fake,” including extracurriculars, recommendations and interviews. He pointed to admissions at Duke University, which stopped giving numerical scores to supplemental essays due to AI concerns in 2024, as an example

“I expect more schools to add video responses and live components, and to read the essay less as a writing sample and more as evidence of thinking,” Butterly wrote

Kailyn Holty

Kailyn Holty ’29 is a news reporter from Redwood City, Calif., and is majoring in economics and quantitative social science

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Source: www.thedartmouth.com