What you’re signing

Before you submit, the application makes you affirm a statement. Most people click through it. I did too, the first time. Then I read it.

In substance, it says that the application and everything in it is your own work, true, and honestly presented. The exact wording is in your own application, on the page before you submit — read it there, not here.

Here is why that sentence matters more than any AI policy page.

About two thirds of colleges publish no AI policy for essays. Kaplan surveyed 220 admissions officers in 2025 and 68% said their school has none; going through the 150 schools in our index one by one, I found nothing published at 102 of them, 68%. So at most schools on your list there is no rule to look up and no box to disclose in. What there is, at every one of them, is the certification in your own application.

That changes the question. It is not “will they detect AI.” Detection tools are unreliable. The question is what you certified. If an AI wrote your essay and you signed that it was your own work, the problem is not a detector. It is that the statement you signed is false, and schools can act on that after you are admitted, or after you enroll. There is no deadline on it.

What this means in practice, in plain terms. Using a grammar checker does not make an essay not yours. Getting feedback on a draft you wrote does not make it not yours. Most schools that address it treat brainstorming questions the same way. An essay drafted by AI is a different thing, and rewriting its sentences does not change whose ideas structured it.

Some schools go further than the general certification. 7 limit AI to proofreading or less, which on our reading reaches feedback on a draft, so Second Read does not review essays for them. 36 publish rules that allow some uses and not others; a few, like Caltech, publish a list of what they consider ethical and unethical uses. The checker shows you which is which for your list, with each school’s exact words.

If English is not your first language

One more thing, since I applied as an international student. 6 schools in the index say, in their own published words, that translating an essay you wrote in another language is a misuse of AI: Bates College, Bowdoin College, Bryn Mawr College, California Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Northwestern University. Each link goes to the quote. If you draft in Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin or anything else, check your schools’ rows before you touch any tool — and write the English yourself.

This page is not legal advice and I am not your counselor. Read your schools’ actual pages. Every card in the checker links to them.