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AI Wrote His Essay. Columbia Suspended Him. Here's What the Smartest Schools Are Doing Instead.
AI Wrote His Essay
In March of this year, a Korean-American student named Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia University after it was determined that he had relied too heavily on AI in writing his application essays thus it was deemed that AI Wrote his essay. The case drew wide attention partly because of its specific circumstances and partly because of what it represents: the moment when AI-assisted admissions writing stopped being a theoretical concern and became a documented disciplinary reality.
Around the same time, polling from RAND found that 62% of American middle school, high school, and college students now regularly use AI to complete homework assignments. Two-thirds of those students acknowledged that doing so had harmed their critical thinking skills. A third reported using AI specifically to draft or revise written work.
The implications are significant: a student who scores well on writing-related assessments may be genuinely unable, without AI assistance, to compose a coherent personal email. The skill that looks present on the transcript has not actually been developed in the student.
The New York Times published a major report in April 2026 examining how AI is reshaping writing education. Based on interviews with nearly 400 high school and college educators, the report found that take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police that many teachers have simply stopped assigning them. In their place, in-class writing has returned, with students observed as they work. Prompts have also shifted toward personal reflection and reaction, types of writing that AI struggles to produce convincingly because they require genuine lived experience as their raw material.
How Top Boarding Schools Are Responding
The most revealing picture of where elite American education is heading comes not from press releases but from the official academic integrity policies that institutions like Exeter, Choate, Lawrenceville, Deerfield, St. Paul's, Hotchkiss, and Milton Academy have developed in response to AI.
Reviewing these policies, a consistent posture emerges. Top boarding schools are not banning AI outright. They are treating it as a variable that must be carefully constrained, and most are drawing a clear line between AI as a limited productivity tool and AI as a substitute for student thinking.
The specific boundaries vary by school and sometimes by course within a school, with many institutions giving individual teachers the authority to define acceptable AI use within their classrooms. But the collective signal is clear: these schools are not going to allow AI to erode the development of the underlying capacities they exist to cultivate.
That recalibration is itself significant. It means that what these institutions consider worth developing in a student, and by extension what selective colleges will look for in applications, is shifting.
The Capacities That Are Becoming More Valuable, Not Less
When AI can produce a more technically polished essay than most students can write independently, the question of what human capability actually means gets genuinely interesting. Elite educators are converging on a few answers.
Deep focus and sustained attention. The ability to stay with a complex problem or text for an extended period without reaching for distraction is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. AI recommendation systems and instant search have trained the average brain to expect rapid stimulation and frequent context-switching. A student who can read a difficult text slowly, sit with confusion rather than immediately resolving it through a search, and sustain concentrated effort for hours is exercising a capacity that most of their peers are allowing to atrophy. This is not a soft skill. It is a cognitive infrastructure that determines what kind of thinking a person is capable of.
The ability to ask original questions. When AI can handle "how," the human contribution increasingly lives in "why" and "for whom." A machine can generate standard answers at scale. It cannot generate the question that emerges from a specific person's specific experience, frustration, or obsession. The student who reads an assigned text and comes away with a question that genuinely puzzles them, one that they cannot immediately resolve with a search, is exercising exactly the kind of intellectual initiative that cannot be simulated. This quality, the drive to ask rather than just to answer, is what makes someone an original thinker rather than an efficient processor.
Authentic voice and individual perspective. Hotchkiss, among other boarding schools, explicitly emphasizes what they call "authentic voice" in writing. This is not a stylistic preference. It is a recognition that when AI can produce formally correct writing with ease, the human value in written expression shifts entirely to what cannot be replicated: the specific angle of vision, the particular sense of humor, the emotional texture that comes from a life actually lived. An essay about a moment in a specific community, filtered through a specific person's way of seeing, cannot be generated by any language model because the underlying experience and perspective do not exist in any training data. This is why admissions offices that understand the moment are not looking for technically perfect writing. They are looking for writing that could only have come from one person.
Three Ways to Use AI Without Losing the Point
For students who are currently using AI in their academic work, a few distinctions are worth drawing clearly.
The most defensible use of AI is as a challenger rather than a collaborator. Before drafting, ask an AI to generate the strongest possible counterarguments to your position. This sharpens your own thinking and forces you to defend your actual views rather than simply producing text. The output belongs to you; the AI has only helped you stress-test it.
A second legitimate use is for surface-level correction: grammar, spelling, word choice at the level of a dictionary substitution. This is fundamentally different from surrendering the narrative itself. The structure of an argument, the choice of which experience to write about, the angle from which you approach a question: these cannot be delegated without losing the essential thing.
The third principle is the most important: keep the right to ask the questions yourself. The most selective universities are not ultimately looking for students who can produce correct answers. They are looking for students who can ask questions that matter. AI can only respond to questions it is given. It cannot generate the question that has been bothering you since you read something unexpected, or since something went wrong in a way you haven't fully understood yet.
What This Means for Applications
The Columbia suspension is a data point, but the underlying trend it represents is larger. Selective universities and top boarding schools have recognized that AI-generated writing is both ubiquitous and detectable, and they are adjusting accordingly, both through honor code enforcement and through changing what they ask students to produce.
The schools that understand the moment, like Johns Hopkins replacing a generic "why this school" prompt with a question about a first step in a real experience, or Caltech requiring multiple essays that would be genuinely difficult to produce without direct engagement, are testing for something specific: evidence that a human being actually lived through something and thought about it in their own terms.
This is not a temporary adjustment. It is a response to a structural shift in what writing means. AI has made technically proficient generic writing nearly free and nearly instant. The result is that technically proficient generic writing is now worth almost nothing. What has become rare and therefore valuable is writing that could only have come from one specific person's experience, attention, and way of making sense of the world.
The student who develops that capacity, by reading carefully, thinking slowly, staying with confusion, and asking their own questions, is building something that no model can replicate and no admissions policy can easily discount.
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