UNC drops AI essay scoring from undergraduate admissions
After years of rising essay scores, UNC-Chapel Hill says AI grading tools stopped telling reviewers anything useful and cut them from this year's process.
What happened: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has stopped using an AI tool to score first-year applicant essays for the 2026-27 admissions cycle. The admissions office previously used a feature called Reader AI, part of the Slate for Admissions & Enrollment platform, to pre-read essays and recommendation letters and generate a score based on grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation and length. A university spokesperson said the office regularly reviews its procedures and decided the AI-assisted writing rating no longer added anything useful to decisions.
Why it matters: The reason given is notable: it's not that the AI was unreliable or biased in the abstract, but that applicants' own use of AI writing tools made its scores less meaningful. The spokesperson said scores kept skewing higher over time, flattening out the differences the tool was supposed to detect. In effect, widespread AI use by one group of people broke an AI tool used by another group to evaluate them -- a feedback loop worth watching anywhere AI grades AI-assisted work.
How it works, plainly: Reader AI didn't make admissions decisions. It summarized documents for human readers and attached a writing-quality score meant to flag strong or weak essays quickly. As applicants increasingly used AI for brainstorming, grammar checks or drafting help, the essays it scored became more uniformly polished, so the tool's score stopped distinguishing one strong essay from another. UNC says essay review now rests entirely with human readers, alongside a reduced workload: supplemental essays were dropped, leaving one required essay per applicant this cycle.
The rollout: UNC frames this as an ongoing evaluation rather than a permanent ban on AI in admissions -- the office says it will keep assessing whether such tools are useful. Outside voices quoted are split: a UNC learning-sciences professor called the university's approach deliberate and cautious; an independent admissions counselor said AI isn't ready to replace human judgment on things like context and resilience, though she noted some applicants now avoid any AI help at all for fear of being flagged. Students interviewed were divided too, with some saying human readers carry their own biases that AI removal doesn't fix.