Investigating the threat of AI to undergraduate medical school admissions: a study of its potential impact on the rating of applicant essays
Joshua Choi, Jenny Zhao, Thuy-Anh Ngo, Lawrence Grierson · 2025
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Description
Joshua Choi, Jenny Zhao, Thuy-Anh Ngo, and Lawrence Grierson test whether AI help changes how admissions essays are judged, in this 2025 study. Medical schools use short personal essays to judge qualities that grades cannot show. Tools that write fluent text raise the worry that essays no longer reflect the applicant.
Eight raters with varied roles scored essays from twenty-four writers in four groups. Some writers were medical school hopefuls and some were not, and some in each set used AI help. A fourth group of essays came from ChatGPT alone. After training on one rating scale, the raters gave scores that did not differ in a meaningful way across the four groups. Agreement between raters was low overall. The authors argue that AI adds to doubts about what these essays can prove, and they suggest medical schools drop essays from admissions.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Joshua Choi, Jenny Zhao, Thuy-Anh Ngo, Lawrence Grierson |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 16 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |