Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Amid funding pressures in higher education, colleges and universities’ admissions offices are turning to AI to accelerate their workloads, by reading essays and reviewing transcripts.

Experts say that 50% of colleges were using AI in their admissions review process.

One of the most prominent cases concerns Virginia Tech, a large public university with more than 30,000 undergraduates and an acceptance rate of about 55%.

Applicants are required to write four short essays. The AI system can scan about 250,000 essays in under an hour, compared with a human reader who averages about two minutes per essay.

“Based on last year’s application pool, we’re saving at least 8,000 hours,” said to Bloomberg Juan Espinoza, vice provost for enrollment management at Virginia Tech.

“This year, both a single reader and AI will give scores for each essay question, and if there’s a discrepancy, an additional human reader will also give a score,” he added.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, AI is used for initial screening before essays are reviewed by admissions officers. The technology scores student writing based on word choice, sentence structure, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and length.