UCAS Personal Statements and AI

[Ceramiq]

I don't really understand how universities are going to be able to use Personal Statements in future: it is so easy to write and/or improve a fantastic PS in minutes using Claude. Any thoughts?

They don’t really use them now to be fair, so no change.

They aren’t relevant anyway really.

Then why have them at all? Why bother with the recent change in format?

TBH my experience is that they are used though far less in very standard cases (UK schools, GCSEs, A-levels).

If they are used, then it’s not as an assessment of how articulate the applicant is, so how brilliantly crafted it is doesn’t matter.

They’re still part of the UCAS application because some courses at some unis still want them. When applicants are interviewed they can help as an ice breaker and to give the applicant something to focus on.

Yeh as others say, the PS is not particularly significant. And it is certainly not marked for grammar and style as an essay might be so using AI is not such an issue (apart from making it sound a bit rubbish).

The content will need to be there as ever, AI or not, if it is a deciding factor.

X post with @titchy saying the same :)

I think though - AI cannot generate you the activities which make the content? So if you have done some relevant work experience - yes AI can make that sound more impressive , but you still need the work experience?
that said, I agree that it’s all probably irrelevant anyway, at least for many universities.
i do think it’s a useful exercise though for the prospective student themselves to think about all the things they have done and why they matter.

id say its more the activities you have done etc rather than how you word them.

Isn’t this the last year they’re doing them anyway?

@IHeartKingThistle The personal statement is still going to be used but it changed this year into three questions. You still have to write the same amount but in a way that you are answering the three questions.
@Titchy @LastHotel I agree that some universities do not care about the personal statement at all e.g. Bristol but some universities state that it is very important in their decision-making e.g. LSE and Bath.
I have had a look at the offers shown on Chat University and What do they know FOI and I can see that LSE accepts students with lower grades than others (when they are non-contextual) and I assume this is because of the personal statement. Some students with 4A* predicted grades and mostly 9s at GCSE are rejected from LSE for Economics, Finance and Management degrees and this can only be based on their personal statement.
I think for less competitive degrees, the personal statement doesn't matter too much and it is about the grades only.

Most unis don’t look at them.

Those that do are more interested in the specifics of the applicant’s situation- what they have done, read etc- rather than some fluent but generic text about the subject.

For Oxbridge (two universities that definitely read the PS) they may use it as the basis for some of their interview questions, so good luck if you’ve just relied on ChatGPT.

AI does a great job writing a PS about what a student has read and done!

We’ve never used the PS except to inform the interview, because there has never been a way to know how much help was received.

I agree with the comments above, but UCAS also provides guidance. The essence is that AI is an acceptable editing tool but may not be used to generate content.

I imagine that each LLM has only so many templates for generating a PS around (1) my passion for Victorian literature and existential philosophy, (2)my grade 8 in piano and flute (3) my DoE Gold (4) my plan to bring peace to the world and (5) my worst flaw - excessive modesty.

With various types of pattern repetition, and considering the scale of applications, I expect that UCAS similarity searches will be rather effective at turning up AI written PSs. From next year, when the PS is segmented, this task should be even easier.

UCAS has always notified universities of a positive search outcome. We almost always withdraw the application as do others I know of. If the similarity is serious, UCAS simply cancels it. However the ban is usually only for one year.

@poetryandwine Claude is a fantastic tool for discussing and redrafting PSs - way more sophisticated than your assumption ;)

I know Claude is very good! One of the best.

But the software is good, too. It is checking for pretty subtle stuff.

‘Redrafting’ is an interesting word, at the border of composing and editing. It is a grey area. Because discretion rests with the universities, I would err on the side of caution. The crux of the matter is that a university is never obliged to admit anyone.

I participated in a workshop recently to guess which examples of high quality technical prose were written by AI. Working collaboratively we were correct about 80% of the time. This was not because of fault finding, so it was quite interesting.

You don't need Claude to actually compose a single sentence of a PS for it to be a highly valuable editing assistant. For fun, I asked Claude to comment on a recent PS that my DC submitted for a successful Masters application. I didn't tell Claude anything about the rest of the application or that it had been successful, just the course choice. Claude challenged many parts of the PS and it was a really interesting exercise that allowed me and my DC to articulate many assumptions behind what had been written and explain them to Claude. At no point did Claude proffer any rewriting - it was all about ensuring that all bases were covered. I then offered Claude a recent unsuccessful PS for LSE undergrad and its analysis of why it was unsuccessful was completely in line with my own.

I think what you are describing would fall into the category of ‘editing’. That’s arguably an equalising tool, especially as free AI improves, giving (almost) all applicants access to analytical expertise that only some could access before.

To anyone reading this:

For avoidance of doubt, I am not involved with admissions at present. I was told of the UCAS guidance that I summarised above, at 11.41, by someone reliable who should know. It sounds right to me in that it is consistent with longstanding UCAS policy.

But no one should take my word for it. If you have any questions, please consult UCAS directly.

FWIW the exercise described by @Ceramiq in her most recent post seems to me a perfectly acceptable basis for human revision of the PS. This is nothing more than using AI as a discerning critic. Critical friends have never been banned by UCAS and insofar as I understand the permitted use of AI for the PS, this falls well within its remit.

Tbh Claude was hugely more detailed and precise than any human PS editor I have ever come across (and I have seen an awful lot of commented PSs in my time).

I’ve now looked up the current
UCAS guidance on the use of AI. It is consistent with what I wrote above and, IMO, with @Ceramiq ’s use of Claude as described above.

I think her suggestion to try using Claude or another AI tool as a critic is a great idea, always supposing one stops short of asking it to write for one (though it may offer some ideas for phrasing, and UCAS is fine with this in limited amounts). But a paradox of AI is that the output reflects the input, though this varies with the situation, so don’t take the results of a critique as gold standard if they seem wrong!

Of course the UCAS guidance should be rechecked closer to the relevant admissions cycle.

"so don’t take the results of a critique as gold standard if they seem wrong!"

Very much agree with this. With my DCs already successful PS, Claude was quite damning about some of the sentences, in particular the opening and closing sentences which it deemed very weak. Once we explained that those sentences were addressing the Course Convenor directly, someone known to my DC and in a highly specific admissions context that we further elaborated upon, Claude understood that those sentences were powerful. The initial advice proferred by Claude was generic. It also raved about one particular paragraph which, while undoubtedly good, had been quite clever at hinting about more substance than there truly was behind an activity.

most Personal statements don’t make a difference to an offer. The statement is valuable to explain unusual events - an applicant who spent 2 years in hospital with a major illness or similar extenuating circumstances. But for most courses, the decision is based on grades.

My DS had blank page syndrome with his PS last year. I set up a prompt for him in chatGPT, asking it to "interview" him about all his different experiences around the three themes of the PS, to draw out as many ideas as possible. It was incredibly helpful - it helped him identify all kinds of relevant things he otherwise wouldn't have thought to include.

We then prompted it to sum up by providing short bullets for the best experiences to include in each section, being very explicit that it should not draft any actual content.

He then wrote the PS by hand and didn't do any further editing with AI. His finished statement was strong (good enough to get an Oxbridge interview) but very obviously human and 100% "him".

LLM don’t use templates as such, but humans definitely do. And teachers advising students are also likely to suggest very similar ways of wording a PS.

Are you suggesting UCAS is cancelling applicants who use AI? Do they warn applicants of this? Why do they do this if it is recognised that other students get other people to write the statement? Why is getting AI to write something any worse than getting someone else to?

I find the idea of universities not using Personal Statements to assess applications because they cannot gauge how much help students receive absolutely crazy. Either you have a PS and you use it or you don't have a PS. Bocconi University in Milan discarded its PS a couple of years ago and now recruits solely on grades (a combination of a standardized test, either the SAT or a proprietary test, and a student's grades in Years 11 and 12). I'm not sure Bocconi is entirely transparent about its calculation but, be that as it may, abandoning the PS was the moral move. If you require students to provide a PS you must use it and if you don't want to use it you must not require it.

UCAS has to have systems that suit every UK university though, so if a handful of unis tell them that some of their courses still use the PS, then the PS will remain.

Italy I assume doesn’t have a centralised system and applicants apply direct, so if B don’t use a PS, they won’t ask for one.