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Ideas and editing yes, complete responses no
Columbia Business School permits generative AI for idea generation and for editing writing that is already yours, and prohibits using it to produce complete responses. The line is enforced through the Honor Code: misrepresentation, including passing off generated answers as your own, is grounds for rescinding an offer. Brainstorm and polish freely; generating the answer itself is the violation.
This is our plain-English reading of CBS's published materials, not the school's own words. Read the official source before you rely on it.
This is the most cleanly drawn bounded-use policy of the twelve, in our reading. Both permitted uses keep you as the writer: ideas flow toward you before drafting, and edits flow over text you already wrote. The prohibited use replaces you. That before-and-after structure makes self-policing straightforward: ask where the words on the page originated.
The Honor Code framing raises the stakes beyond essay quality. Columbia treats a generated response as a misrepresentation problem, the same category as a false employment claim, and the remedy (rescission) applies after admission. The policy is generous exactly because the enforcement is severe.
CBS's official policy · Sourced Jul 14, 2026
Wherever a school asks for a disclosure, the statement itself should be yours. Our free compliance check audits how you used AI against CBS's rules and shows what your own statement needs to cover; it never writes it for you.
Run the free AI-policy compliance check →The full field, side by side, lives on the MBA AI-policy hub. CBS's current essay prompts are on the prompt tracker.
Yes, editing your own writing is explicitly permitted. The text being edited has to exist first and has to be yours. Feeding the tool a prompt and receiving an essay is the prohibited case, however much you edit the result afterward.
Any answer whose substance arrived generated rather than written. A full essay is the obvious case, but a generated paragraph you lightly reworded fails the same test. Columbia's frame is origin: your ideas may be sharpened by a tool, not supplied by one.
The Honor Code makes misrepresentation grounds for rescission, and passing off generated responses as your own writing is misrepresentation under the policy. The permitted uses are broad enough that there is no good reason to test the prohibited one.
School policies change between and within cycles. This page reflects CBS's public materials as of the sourced date above; always confirm against the live application before you rely on it.