Bad advice to aspiring students

In late summer and early fall, I experience an uptick in emails from prospective students who are interested in doing graduate work with me. Getting emails at this time of the year is neither unique to me as a professor, nor to this particular year. However, there are trends in the last two years that are quite troubling. Nearly all the emails that I am getting from our part of the world (mostly from Pakistan, but occasional ones from other countries in South Asia) have uncanny similarities. The emails start with the prospective student introducing themselves and then have a specific paragraph about my work and what part of my work 'inspires' them. The sentence structure of these emails is almost identical. The worst part is that all of these students are 'inspired' (their words not mine) by the results of the exact same paper that came out last year!

I try my best to respond to every email inquiry about graduate school – even if my response is short and points the students to resources in my department. But lately, I have been wondering if someone is sharp enough to (supposedly) read my papers, why can't they figure out what the admission process is? And how come they all seem to read only one particular paper, even when their training and background has little to do with that study?

Intrigued by one such email, I responded back to a prospective student and scheduled a zoom call. The student was polite, respectful and eager to join the graduate programme. There was, however, one problem. This particular student (despite the text of their email) had no idea about my research or my recent papers – including the paper that was mentioned in the email as a source of their inspiration! The conversation, while pleasant, was quite short. I have not heard from the student since.

Because the emails come from students at different universities, and similar emails come from students in other countries in the region, it is not difficult to figure out that most of these prospective students are using generative AI to write such emails and have chosen the convenient path. The real question is, why are they doing it? When I asked some academic colleagues in Pakistan, they told me about the pervasive nature of AI use by students. The argument, according to them, was that many of our students find AI as a convenient tool not because it is fast and summarises the results of someone's work, it also ensures that the emails and letters do not suffer from grammatical errors. That may be true, but that argument is weak. The solution of lack of proficiency is to make an effort to improve language, not mask it by auto-generated text.

It turns out that the pervasive use of AI in generating cover letters and emails by students is only half the story. When I asked some students, they told me that they were strongly encouraged by their professors to use AI tools to write such cover letters. This to me is even more disturbing. Not only are we telling our students to do less work in thinking, reading and synthesising, but we are negatively impacting the chances of a large group of students. Instead of asking our students to be original, we are telling them to be dependent on tools that produce sloppy text and erroneous summaries. We are asking them to do what everyone else is doing and hence only generating noise. We are setting them up for failure in interviews, and, in doing so, creating a certain bias against other students at our institutions. Our insistence on efficiency is hurting the chances of our current and future students.

Much is being said these days by leaders of our institutions whether our universities and classrooms are AI-ready or not, but I feel that something more fundamental is missing. The point is not whether a classroom or university is equipped or not, it is about whether the teacher is equipped to create a sense of rigour, inquiry, integrity, curiosity and creativity. We should ask ourselves, and not a bot, to ponder on that query.