双语阅读| ChatGPT可能永远改变留学申请文书

纤竹无泪、拒泪

这篇文章讨论了人工智能聊天机器人如何可能影响大学申请，特别是个人陈述文书的写作。文章提出了一些潜在的优势，如帮助构思话题和提高写作趣味性，也提出了一些顾虑,如剽窃和公平性。总体上，文章采取了平衡和开放的态度，认为AI在这里的作用还有待观察，但它可能为一些学生提供帮助。

本文英文摘自纽约时报2023年9月1日文章，作者是Natasha Singer。中文内容仅供参考理解，非全文翻译稿。

I spent the last week talking with university officials, teachers and high school seniors about the dreaded college admissions essay.

我上周与大学官员、老师和高中毕业班学生就可怕的大学入学申请文书进行了交谈。

I cover education technology at The Times. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, which can manufacture school essays and other texts, might reshape the college application process.

我在纽约时报负责报道教育技术。我一直在思考人工智能工具如ChatGPT等可能如何重塑大学申请过程。
I was particularly interested to learn whether admissions officials were rejiggering their essay questions — or even reconsidering personal essays altogether.

我特别有兴趣了解招生官员是否正在调整他们的文书问题——或者甚至重新考虑个人文书。
Amid a deluge of high school transcripts and teacher recommendations, admissions officers often use students’ writing samples to identify applicants with unique voices, experiences, ideas and potential. How might that change now that many students are using A.I. chatbots to brainstorm topics, generate rough drafts and hone their essays?

在大量的高中成绩单和老师推荐信中,招生官员经常通过学生的写作样本来识别具有独特视角、经历、想法和潜力的申请者。现在许多学生都在使用AI聊天机器人来洞察话题、生成草稿和完善他们的文书,这种情况可能会如何改变?
To find out, I contacted admissions officials at more than a dozen large state universities, Ivy League schools and small private colleges, including Juan Espinoza, the director of undergraduate admissions at Virginia Tech.

为了弄清楚,我联系了十几所大州立大学、常春藤盟校和小型私立大学的招生官员,包括弗吉尼亚理工大学本科招生主任Juan Espinoza。

Right now, he told me, many universities are still trying to figure out how the A.I. technologies work and what they mean for the admissions process.

他告诉我,目前许多大学仍在试图弄明白这些AI技术的工作原理以及它们对招生过程的意义。
“But let’s be clear: Students are using it to answer these essay questions,” he added. “So we need to think about how they are using it.”

“但让我们明确一点:学生正在使用它来回答这些文书问题,”他补充说。“所以我们需要考虑他们正在如何使用它。”

You can read more in my article today about the implications of A.I. tools for college applications.

您可以在我今天的文章中阅读更多关于AI工具对大学申请影响的内容。

The A.I. skeptics
AI怀疑论者

I also gleaned some interesting insights into what admissions offices are thinking about ChatGPT by listening to podcasts from different universities. “Inside the Yale Admissions Office,” a podcast from Yale University, devoted an episode to A.I. tools this week.

通过收听不同大学的播客,我也对ChatGPT等工具对招生办公室的思考获得了一些有趣的见解。耶鲁大学的播客“Inside the Yale Admissions Office”本周专门推出了一期关于AI工具的节目。

The title of the episode — “A.I. and College Essays: Wrong Question, Wrong Answer” — is blunt about Yale’s viewpoint.

这一集的标题——“AI和大学文书:错误的问题,错误的答案”——直接表明了耶鲁大学的观点。

During the podcast, two Yale admissions officers discussed how using tools like ChatGPT to write college essays was a form of plagiarism. An applicant who submitted a chatbot-generated essay, they said, would violate the university’s admissions policy.

在播客中,两位耶鲁大学的招生官员讨论了使用ChatGPT等工具来写大学文书是一种剽窃的行为。他们说,提交聊天机器人生成的文书的申请者将违反该大学的招生政策。

The Yale experts also argued that personal essays for college applications were “meant to be introspective and reflective.” And they said outsourcing that kind of personal thinking to an A.I. chatbot would not help.

这两位耶鲁专家还认为,大学申请的个人文书“意在是内省和反思的”。他们说,将这种个人思考外包给AI聊天机器人不会有帮助。

“A.I.-generated content simply isn’t very good at the mode of communication that works in college essays,” Hannah Mendlowitz, senior associate director of admissions at Yale, said on the podcast.

“AI生成的内容在大学文书所需的交流模式上确实不太出色,”耶鲁大学招生办公室高级副主任Hannah Mendlowitz在播客中说。
But after doing a few basic A.I. experiments, I have a feeling that such views may not hold up for long.

但是在做了一些基本的AI实验之后,我觉得这样的观点可能撑不了多久。

This week, I used ChatGPT and other tools to manufacture responses to some of the short-answer questions from Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth. Although the A.I. bots got some facts wrong, after several rounds of prompts and prodding they produced passable writing. It was easy to see how high school students might use these tools to generate first drafts and then rewrite the texts to reflect their own voices and experiences.

本周,我使用ChatGPT和其他工具生成了耶鲁、哈佛、普林斯顿和达特茅斯的一些短答题的回答。虽然AI机器人在一些事实上出错了,但在几轮提示和敦促后,它们产生了可以接受的写作。可以很容易看出,高中生如何可能会使用这些工具生成首稿,然后重写文本以反映他们自己的观点和经历。

Ethical or not, the tools may help students who feel stuck, or who are not naturally drawn to essay writing, get started.

不论道德与否,这些工具可能会帮助那些感到困惑或天生不善写作的学生开始写作。

A democratizing force
进步力量

Espinoza of Virginia Tech and other admissions experts told me that they thought ChatGPT could be a democratizing force, especially for high school students whose parents have limited or no experience applying to colleges.

弗吉尼亚理工大学的Espinoza和其他招生专家告诉我,他们认为ChatGPT可能是一个进步的力量,尤其是对父母在申请大学方面经验有限或没有经验的高中生。

“I wonder what role this could play in simplifying this complex process,” Espinoza said, adding that he was a first-generation collegegoer himself. “If there’s a way this tool can help those that have a different starting point catch up, or narrow those discrepancies, I think that shows a lot of promise.”

“我想知道这种工具在简化这个复杂过程方面能起什么作用,”Espinoza说,他自己也是第一代上大学的。“如果这种工具能帮助那些起点不同的人赶上来,或缩小这些差异,我认为这显示了很大的前景。”

To get some suggestions on how high school students applying to college might use A.I. tools, I interviewed Meg Scheid, the college outreach coordinator at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, a top public high school in the Atlanta area.

为了获取一些建议,了解申请大学的高中生可能如何使用AI工具,我采访了Meg Scheid,她是亚特兰大地区顶级公立高中Gwinnett数学、科学和技术学院的大学外联协调员。

As ChatGPT gained traction in schools last winter, she worried that students across the country might use it to pass off A.I.-generated writing as their own work. She quickly changed her mind after she realized that high school students could use A.I. tools to conduct college searches to fit narrow criteria — like large public universities in the South that are known for their biostatistics research, or small private colleges that offer full scholarships to soccer players.
随着ChatGPT于去年冬天在学校获得影响力,她担心全国各地的学生可能会使用它,将AI生成的写作作为自己的作品。但在她意识到高中生可以使用AI工具根据狭窄的标准进行大学搜索后,她很快改变了看法——如以生物统计研究而闻名的南部大型公立大学,或为足球运动员提供全额奖学金的小型私立大学。
Scheid said A.I. chatbots might also be helpful for students who were trying to condense long lists of extracurricular activities into the limited spaces on college applications.

Scheid说,AI聊天机器人也可能对那些试图将大量课外活动凝聚到有限的大学申请空间中的学生有帮助。

“It allows students to make sure that they are letting colleges know: ‘I wasn’t just a captain of the basketball team. I also did these other things that really point to me as a person,’” she said.

“它允许学生确保让他们知道大学:'我不仅仅是篮球队的队长。我还做了这些其他真正指向我这个人的事情,'她说。

A.I. brainstorming
AI头脑风暴

Khan Academy, the online education nonprofit, recently developed its own A.I. chatbot for schools, called Khanmigo. And now it includes a feature designed to help students come up with ideas for college admissions essays. I tried it this week.

在线教育非营利组织可汗学院最近为学校开发了自己的AI聊天机器人,名为Khanmigo。现在它包含一个旨在帮助学生提出大学入学申请文书思路的功能。我本周试过了。

Khanmigo can be a chatty, upbeat collaborator. It begins a session by advising students that college essays are not the “place to share a list of your achievements — rather, it’s a chance to reveal your unique personality and perspective.”

Khanmigo可以是一个健谈、积极的合作伙伴。它通过建议学生,大学文书不是“分享你成就清单的地方——而是展现你独特个性和观点的机会”来开始一次对话。

Then it offers students a list of common pitfalls to avoid when writing their essays. One is: “Don’t write about how the suffering of others made you realize how lucky you are, or how good your life is. This kind of essay makes college admissions officers cringe.”

然后它为学生提供了一份在写作文书时应避免的常见陷阱清单。一个是:“不要写关于其他人的苦难如何让你意识到自己有多幸运,或者你的生活有多好。这种文书会让大学招生官员难以接受。”

I think the brainstorming feature could be useful, especially for students who are having trouble deciding on an essay topic. Khanmigo starts by asking users overview questions about their experiences. Then it homes in on themes that sound promising.

我认为头脑风暴功能可能很有用,尤其是对于难以确定文书主题的学生。Khanmigo首先就用户的经历提出概述性问题。然后它集中在听起来有前景的主题上。

I tried out a real example from my teenage years: One summer I worked in a bagel store in the mornings and interned at a genetics lab in the afternoons.

我尝试了我青少年时代的一个真实例子:一个夏天的早上我在贝果店工作,下午在一个遗传实验室实习。

The software went on to ask for visual details about the bagel store and the lab. Those kinds of descriptions could clearly help enrich an opening scene in a college essay.
该软件继续询问关于贝果店和实验室的视觉细节。这些描述明显可以帮助丰富大学文书开场白中的场景。

I am not arguing that A.I. tools are a perfect substitute for teachers, counselors, parents, friends and other humans who can help with college essays. But I appreciated the instant feedback from Khanmigo and the other A.I. chatbots I tried this week. It definitely made essay-writing more fun! High Quality Essay Writing Service on https://www.lunwenhelp.com/essay-daixie/

我并不是说AI工具可以完美地取代老师、顾问、父母、朋友和其他可以帮助写大学文书的人。但我很欣赏本周从Khanmigo和我尝试的其他AI聊天机器人获得的即时反馈。它绝对使写作更加有趣!