The college counseling department introduced UPrep seniors to ADDIE this September, a new AI tool that helps counselors view students’ inspiration for supplemental essays.
ADDIE, which stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate, is an instructional design model that sorts data from chats, calls, and teacher comments to find interests, achievements, and personal stories, according to getaddie.com.
Students have the option to message or call with ADDIE’s AI software, but UPrep’s college counseling has seniors only use the message option. ADDIE asks students a question about their extracurriculars, interests, or achievements, and students can make their answers as in-depth as they want. Many colleges and universities require applicants to write supplemental essays about their personal and academic accomplishments, which is where ADDIE comes in.
“ADDIE’s ability to synthesize a student’s interests and generate essay ideas saves time while encouraging deeper self-reflection,” Director of College Counseling Kelly Herrington said.
ADDIE asks students the same questions that college counselors would have asked, but now their answers are stored in the model to be recalled by students when writing personal essays and by college counselors when writing letters of recommendation.
“Sometimes students forget what they’ve done, and so we now have a record through what students put into ADDIE,” Herrington said.
So far, only a few schools have begun using it, including Lakeside, according to Herrington. Lakeside High School’s college counseling team is currently introducing ADDIE to its junior class.
“The way we’re doing it, instead of having a traditional survey or questionnaire that a student will complete, they have phone conversations with ADDIE,” Director of Lakeside College Counseling Ari Worthman said.
Worthman estimates Lakeside students will have eight to ten 15-minute conversations, which cover most of what the team would have asked in their student questionnaire.
“What you could say on a phone is so much more detailed than what you can say in a questionnaire, just because of the time it takes to write,” Worthman said. “It’s a much better use of the student’s time.”
Regardless of the benefits of using ADDIE, one student is concerned about keeping their personal information safe. Senior Corey Streat opted out of using ADDIE and instead answered the same questions on a Google Doc, as students have done in years prior.
“I’ve got a pretty strong anti-AI stance,” Streat said. “The amount of personal information it asked for was going to be a no regardless, because my parents raised me with pretty good internet safety [skills].”
Despite these concerns, ADDIE claims that user privacy is their priority, according to getaddie.com.
“This is not open source AI. It is contained. We would never do anything where we were putting any type of student information out there,” Herrington said.
Senior Lucas Keppler agrees that ADDIE can be helpful for students and counselors, but believes the platform itself is not necessary.
“From a student’s perspective, it’s useful to write down your thoughts,” Keppler said, “But that could be done with anything that lets you write on a computer, so it’s about the same as Microsoft Word.”
Herrington is open to student feedback on whether or not to keep using it.
“I want to stress, this is a pilot,” Herrington said. “Maybe this will work, maybe it won’t work, maybe students will like it. We’re going to take their feedback.”
