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AI policy
Somewhere in the last two years, a question that used to be private, did you use AI on this?, became a checkbox on business school applications. Not the same checkbox at every school. Not even the same question. One school asks you to describe your AI use in about 75 words. Another makes you certify you didn't use it at all, with your admission on the line. A third says nothing whatsoever, which applicants keep misreading as permission.
If you're applying to five schools this fall, you are almost certainly subject to five different AI regimes at once. Most applicants haven't read one of them.
These are working summaries of each school's 2026-27 AI and essay policy. Policies change fast, so always confirm against the school's live application before you submit.
Requires disclosure: yes/no checkbox plus ~75-word statement of how and where AI was used.
Prohibits having another person or tool write your essays; a violation risks revoked admission.
Treat AI like another person: it may not substantially write your essay, and Wharton runs AI-detection tools.
No published AI policy as of mid-2026, so disclose conservatively.
Permits AI as a 'sounding board' for reflection, but 'the authorship of this essay must be your own'; the prior citation/footnote requirement is gone for 2026-27.
No published AI policy as of mid-2026, so disclose conservatively.
Permits generative AI for idea generation and to edit your own work; using it to generate complete responses violates the Honor Code, with offers rescinded for misrepresentation.
No formal written AI policy; admissions leadership publicly stresses authentic voice and warns that AI-polished responses hurt candidates (multiple review layers evaluate authenticity).
No policy naming AI, but essays must be 'entirely accurate and exclusively yours'; using tools or professional services to create content that is not your own violates Tuck policy and Dartmouth's Academic Honor Principle.
Official Application Guide bans AI use on the video questions (no scripts or heavy notes; it can harm a strong candidacy); no disclosure requirement published for written essays.
Requires APA-style in-text citation for AI assistance, e.g. (OpenAI, personal communication, date).
No published AI policy as of mid-2026, so disclose conservatively.
Policies as summarized by AdmitForge; confirm against each school's live application before you submit. For the full, maintained AI-policy table, updated and dated as policies shift, see the full, maintained AI-policy table →
Five regimes. Same season. Same applicant.
There are two silences here, and both are traps.
Your silence. Suppose you used AI somewhere in your process, brainstorming, outlining, tightening a paragraph, and you leave a disclosure checkbox at “no,” or breeze past a citation requirement. You haven't avoided the question. You've converted a routine disclosure into a certification issue. Schools treat application statements the way employers treat resumes: a discovered misrepresentation isn't graded on the size of the underlying act. And the failure mode isn't hypothetical detection software, it's the interview where you're asked about your process, the verification services schools already use, and the fact that some schools' policies explicitly reach past the admit date. The applicants who get hurt won't mostly be the ones who used AI. They'll be the ones who said they didn't.
The school's silence. A school publishing no policy does not mean it has no opinion. It means the standard is unwritten, which is strictly worse for you, because you don't get to read it and the school retains full discretion after the fact. The conservative read, and the one we'd stand behind: where a school says nothing, behave as if the strictest policy on your list applies, and be prepared to describe your process honestly if asked. “They never said I couldn't” has a poor track record as a defense in any admissions office.
Here's the part nobody tells you: the hard part of disclosing honestly isn't courage. It's memory.
A truthful 75-word statement is just a description of what actually happened. Which means it's only writable if you know what actually happened, across four months, six essays, two resume revisions, and whichever tools you touched at 1am in October. Before you check any box this fall, try answering these:
If you answered “no” to most of those, you're normal. You're also, right now, unable to comply honestly with the strictest school on your list, not because you did anything wrong, but because you have no record of what you did. Most applicants discover this in September, staring at the checkbox, trying to reconstruct their own process from memory and vibes. That reconstruction is where honest people end up writing inaccurate certifications.
The applicants who sail through this question in September are the ones whose process generated the record automatically: every AI interaction logged as it happened, per document, per school, so the disclosure statement is a printout, not an archaeology project.
That record-keeping is built into how AdmitForge works, not bolted on. Every essay outline and draft critique you run inside the platform is logged automatically to a per-school AI-use ledger you can export the day you apply. And because the platform critiques and questions but never writes a word of your essays, every entry in that ledger is one you can disclose to any school on the list above without flinching. The rubric we critique against is public. The line we never cross is the reason the log stays clean. Forged, not fabricated.
Essays
The “Why MBA” Essay: What It’s Actually Testing (and 7 Questions to Ask Before You Write a Word)The prompt is a stress test wearing a friendly face. Seven questions to run before you write a word.
Resume
Your Work Resume Will Sink Your MBA Application (Here's How to Tell)The resume that got you hired answers a question admissions committees never ask. Six ways to tell.
Reapplicants
You Got Dinged. Before You Retake Anything, Read Your Rejection Like an AdCom WouldMost reapplicants treat a symptom they never diagnosed. Run the autopsy on the old file first.