ChatGPT Entered A High School Essay Contest. It’s Not Going To Win.

I am the director of a local essay contest for high school students, and while I was working on this year’s prompt, times being what they are, I let ChatGPT take a shot. The results were mediocre, and I wrote about them at Forbes.com.

This year’s prompt asks the writer to show how a character in a major is affected by their relationship with the larger community, and then to show what local teens can learn from that work.

I gave ChatGPT three tries, selecting a work for it to use in responding to the prompt, partly out of curiosity, but also to test the prompt itself. If a chatbot can write a great response to the prompt, then the prompt is wasting students’ time.

First Try

The first attempt used William Faulkner’s Light In August. The bot’s response was smoothly composed, but it highlighted ChatGPT’s tendency to write around the point. Take this section:

Through these experiences, Joe Christmas gradually comes to a deeper understanding of his own identity and the ways in which he is shaped by the larger communities around him.

That sounds great—but what is Christmas’s understanding, exactly? What are the ways he is shaped? Like much of this essay, the sentence promises there’s a point coming, but it never arrives.

Second Try

For the next attempt, I added a specific requirement to include quotes from the work. This is a major weakness of ChatGPT. For the second attempt, ChatGPT was told to use Romo and Juliet, and it included this:

Through his relationship with Juliet, Romeo also experiences a sense of rebellion against the social norms and expectations of his community. He is willing to risk everything, including his own life, to be with Juliet, even though their love is forbidden by their families:

"O, let us hence! I stand on sudden haste." "Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast" (Act 2, Scene 3).

The quote does not have anything to do with Romeo’s willingness to face risk, nor does the bot add anything to explain how the quote supports the point it is positioned to support. ChatGPT uses quotes exactly like a freshman who, realizing the assignment called for quotes, opens the text and drops their finger at random, then just inserts the quote into their essay.

The third try was Hamlet. You can read about that along with the rest of the post over here.