AI is used for reviewing essays during admissions because they don’t get tired.
AI is saving 8,000 hours of humans to read lakhs of applications and scanning 2,50,000 applications under an hour.
With the trend of artificial intelligence, colleges and universities have started integrating artificial intelligence into the admissions process, with little public discussion. It began as reviewing applications for jobs but now it is used to take interviews, review essays, transcripts, and conduct application screening.
Several major institutions have already moved ahead. Caltech is using an AI-powered voice bot to interview applicants about their research projects. Virginia Tech has deployed an AI essay reader capable of scanning approximately 250,000 essays in under an hour, effectively replacing one of the two human readers traditionally assigned to each application. Georgia Tech is applying AI tools to review transfer transcripts, while the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faced student backlash after it emerged that AI systems were evaluating grammar and writing style in applications.
Students are routinely warned not to use AI tools to write their essays, on the grounds that doing so would undermine authenticity and merit. At the same time, institutions are increasingly relying on AI to read, evaluate, and filter those very essays. This asymmetry risks eroding trust in the admissions process, particularly if applicants feel they are being judged by opaque systems they cannot see or challenge.
There must be people to review applications manually which AI have selected because AI contains lots of biased data from past data.
