‘This is the future, my wife says./ We are already there, and it’s the same/ as the present.’ So begins Ciaran O’Driscoll’s poem ‘Please Hold’, about a husband talking to a telephone robot and becoming ever more frustrated at the mind-numbing automation of modern-day life. There’s a lot of ‘Your call is important to us’ and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and ‘We appreciate your patience’, until eventually the speaker resigns himself to the fate of growing old while on hold.
This same reluctant acquiescence can be seen with AI: this is the future, and we are already there. Except instead of asking us to hold, it’s always asking us how it can help, how it can further infiltrate our lives.
AI has already transformed how students learn and schools evaluate. Yet our universities continue to bury their heads in the sand. There has been lots of talk (though not much action) about how AI is undermining the validity of undergraduates’ work and grades. Less has been said about how students are using it to get into university in the first place.
AI is being used at every step of the application process. Personal statements are no longer created on a computer but by a computer. For many teenagers the temptation to ‘collaborate’ with ChatGPT is simply too great. Why labour for weeks over how to express the formative influence of your school debating society when a bot can spit out a draft for you in seconds?
Students are also increasingly using AI to cheat in Oxbridge admissions interviews conducted online. I know tutors who have seen students minimise their screens suspiciously; take dubious pauses before providing an answer they did not previously know (and even mispronouncing it); or hesitate and close windows before agreeing to share their screen. ChatGPT can now listen to an interview and provide answers in real time.
The problem is that this cheating is often impossible to prove. Online interviews, introduced during Covid as a supposedly temporary measure, are a terrible idea. Oxford interviews all its undergraduate applicants online, and Cambridge the vast majority.
The move was partly to eliminate the risk of unconscious bias on behalf of the interviewer – yet if we take this argument to its logical extreme, the best option would be to conduct interviews via WhatsApp messages, so that accent, appearance or any other class signifier can be removed from the equation.
In reality, the decision was probably made so that colleges could avoid the inconvenience and cost of actually having to deal with applicants. I expect there are many academics, administrators and office-bound bureaucrats congratulating themselves on doing away with the expense of travel rebates and free food and accommodation.
I have no doubt there are plenty of students who are terrified by the prospect of having to do their Oxbridge interview from home. I’m also sure there are many who feel they are missing out on a valuable experience: walking the medieval quads and chatting to other academically minded young people. If having interviews online was meant to reduce the burden for applicants, it doesn’t much appear to have succeeded: their numbers are down slightly since 2021.
Not only are the interviews obviously deficient but other elements of the application process have suffered, too. Since Oxbridge tutors have less and less information with which to make their decisions, it’s no surprise when analysis of academic credentials gives way to considerations about a student’s socioeconomic circumstances.
Take English, for example. Oxford tutors no longer look at AS-level grades, but must rely on predicted A-level grades (which are often as reliable as horoscopes – and I say that as a secondary school teacher). The Ucas personal statement has been simplified into three separate questions, with less opportunity for students to demonstrate style or flair. Oxford has also suspended the Elat (English Literature Aptitude Test) – arguably the fairest part of the assessment since students cannot really prep for it. In 2023 the university disastrously tried to move the Elat online, but the software sent schools the wrong questions and failed to record their answers properly. Much as in ‘Please hold’, once again technology obstructs more than it facilitates.
ChatGPT can now listen to your online interview and provide answers in real time
Some people may argue AI is in fact a democratising force. After all, many privileged students have always had help writing personal statements, whether through pushy parents or private tutors – now AI means that all pupils can access some form of support.
Nathaniel McCullagh, director of Simply Learning Tuition, argues that ChatGPT is different because it has no personal or professional responsibility: ‘For private tutoring, it’s not a case of put money in, get a personal statement out. Tutors will help you (often through a long-term mentoring relationship), but they are not going to do it for you: unlike AI, they are not going to misrepresent anything you’ve done or haven’t done. A student using AI to write their personal statement is completely cheating themselves of that feeling of having achieved something: and the more they use it, the more they lose that sense of accountability. Plagiarism becomes normalised and accepted, students miss out on that sense of accomplishment and universities lower their standards accordingly.’
If Oxford and Cambridge want to retain their elite reputations they must accept that the AI genie is out of the bottle and vast numbers of students are already using technology to cheat on their applications.
We need to re-evaluate the whole admissions process, starting by bringing back in-person interviews and designing student statements so they are genuinely personal rather than simply plagiarised. After all, the future is already here.
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