I agree. Thanks for the comment.

Alternatively, services like Grammarly suggest writing the essay yourself, then running it through a GenAI system for editing. This is, fundamentally, one of the services which Grammarly offers. Honestly, I am much more okay with this approach than with having the AI write the first draft.

It’s ASU. I wouldn’t hold my breath. Their usual standard for admission seems to be “Is there a pulse?” (Note that I say this as a member of the faculty of a community college in Arizona—a lot of my students end up at ASU and I work with folk from ASU regularly to discuss articulation issues; I don’t have many kind things to say about ASU.)

Speaking as a mathematics graduate, I’m not sure that the two are equivalent.

I was in school in England in the mid 1970s when calculators were just becoming widespread. I’d been taught how to do long multiplication and division by hand at age 9 or 10, and later, around age 12 or 13, how to use logarithms to make those operations simpler by turning them into additions and subtractions. That was also when I got my first calculator, and by the time I sat my O-levels (in 1979), calculators were permitted in those exams.

I went on to study mathematics at A-level and at university, and whilst calculators were allowed in exams, most of the syllabus was algebra and calculus — all calculations were symbolic, not numerical, so there was little or no scope to use a calculator.

In my A-level physics and chemistry classes, and in my astronomy classes at university, there were some topics that required numerical calculations — stoichiometry experiments in chemistry class spring to mind — but even there, the exam questions tested whether we understood the principles, not whether we could do arithmetic.

Using generative AI to write essays would be more like getting the computer to work out the algebraic manipulations, or figure out how to integrate a mathematical function in calculus, a notoriously difficult problem. And there ARE software packages that can do symbolic mathematics — they have been around since the early 1960s, and some of them could easily be used to answer the algebra and calculus questions on a British A-level mathematics exam.

I’ve used some of these computer algebra systems myself on research projects which involved large-scale algebraic manipulation, because I wanted the CORRECT answer, darn it, and even someone with a mathematics Ph.D. can make mistakes in a long and complicated calculation.

And in regards to law school, it might help you get in, but if you rely on AI to get a degree and pass the BAR, good luck! AI can’t memorize or learn for you.