Can we follow the trend of using AI to fill in college applications?

Free volunteer application software, proven to be useful, highly recommended volunteer application App, and indispensable for volunteer application... At a time when AI is sweeping the country, no field wants to miss this technological feast. Without knowing when, it has quietly occupied the "volunteer" circle, trying to solve the "urgent needs" of candidates and parents.

The 2023 National College Entrance Examination has come to a successful conclusion. According to the arrangement, Henan will release the results on June 25, and candidates can check their scores at that time. Starting from June 26, online volunteer application will also officially begin. The college entrance examination is like a battlefield. Students have been working hard for ten years just to get satisfactory results in the college entrance examination. What school to apply for and what major to choose have become the hot topics of their concern.

If there is such a software, you only need to input your college entrance examination scores, and it can analyze the admission probability of the school you want to apply for, and also recommend the optional majors, would you be tempted? As a member of the college entrance examination army many years ago, the reporter decided to rush to download and try it out!

Is the so-called “tested and effective” AI volunteer application really reliable and trustworthy?

Phenomenon丨The dazzling AI volunteer application system

When the reporter entered "AI volunteer application" into the search system, dozens of software were dazzling. Words such as "authoritative and reliable", "get it done in minutes", "stable, accurate and ruthless" stimulated the reporter's brain and made him impulsive.

The reporter found that among the many software, there are many Internet giants. This "low frequency, high concurrency" market segment has quietly become another revenue target for them. Relevant data show that the paid scale of China's college entrance examination volunteer application market reached 790 million yuan in 2021, and it is expected that this figure will reach 950 million yuan in 2023. In addition to one-on-one offline expert consultation, AI volunteer application software based on big data stands out with its advantages such as simple operation and almost no communication cost, allowing Internet giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, NetEase, Yuanfudao, Zhihu and well-known training institutions to get involved, and it is favored by more and more consumers.

Question: Can the VIP application for volunteering make you a winner in life?

According to the app store ratings, the reporter downloaded several high-scoring and popular volunteer application software. Some of them are "2023 College Entrance Examination Volunteer Application Professional Admission Platform", and some have "University Professional Recruitment Data Analysis"... Just looking at the product introductions of these software is enough to make the "anxious" candidates and parents deeply involved.

After entering the region, score, and liberal arts or science, a curve value for the individual will immediately appear on the homepage of the software. For example, for a liberal arts candidate with a score of 520 in Henan, this score has exceeded the percentage of candidates in the province, and the recommended colleges, relatively safe colleges, and backup colleges are clearly visible. If this is the only function you want, then congratulations, these software will definitely save you a lot of time.

But if you have a headache about complicated forms, volunteer choices, etc., then you may need to choose to buy the 98 yuan volunteer application advanced card VIP. Of course, some people may think that if you can go to a better university with the same score, what does it matter? It should be noted that on the page where you choose to buy, there will often be text such as "AI one-click filling function uses an exclusive big data algorithm, the recommendation is for reference only, please fill in carefully based on your own situation." Therefore, don't let "one-click generation" confuse your eyes!

The reporter interviewed a parent of a candidate who spent 199 yuan to buy an "advanced card". She said that the overwhelming number of online volunteer application assistants now makes people really "hard to love". Many software pages are complicated to use. Clicking through will lead to the page for purchasing services. It seems that you can't continue without buying the card. The purchase is even more troublesome. There are many purchase restrictions and prompt terms. People dare not believe the content of the analysis, so after buying it, it seems like they didn't buy it, and they are very afraid of falling into a trap.

"As far as I know, every candidate has a different mentality when filling out their applications. Some give priority to the comprehensive strength of the school, some candidates and parents value sufficient resources in first-tier cities, and some parents think that the employment rate of the major is more important. Although big data can be analyzed based on what you fill in, there will definitely be errors. It can only serve as a reference and should not be overly relied upon." Guan Fei, director of the Admissions Office of Henan Engineering College, told reporters.

Results: The different answers given by big data are frustrating

"In order to get more numerically based answers, we bought VIP cards from both companies for comparison, and the result made me even more frustrated." Liu, who took the college entrance examination this year, and his family were full of expectations for their choice of AI application assistant, but after some operation, they were disappointed.

Student Liu told the reporter that he and his family purchased VIP cards on two softwares after careful selection, in order to seek common ground while reserving differences, and finally reach a common goal, so that they could have some advantages at the same starting line when filling out the application. However, the results given by AI made them feel helpless, because apart from the backup schools, there were only a handful of schools and majors that overlapped, whether they were colleges for impact or safe schools. Some schools had different recommended majors, and some schools were not in the same recommendation sequence.

The reporter also found that the answers obtained by inputting the same data into different software were very different. An expert who specializes in data analysis told the reporter that such software applications often attract customers to the consumption channel by giving users a little sweetness to achieve the effect of attracting traffic to the software. Most of the data sources are the same, but different algorithms may get different answers, so you should not easily believe them.

Wan Lihong, co-founder and chief technology officer of Zhongyuan Power Intelligent Robot Co., Ltd., told reporters, "The current large-scale model learning technology has developed to a very hot stage, and the learning process requires huge data and powerful computing power. Generally speaking, we cannot directly hand over the problem of filling out the application form to AI models such as chatGPT, because the answers given by chatGPT may be general and have a pan-entertainment nature. If the large model needs to be useful, it is necessary to conduct large-scale self-supervision and self-attention learning based on the number of candidates in the college entrance examination each year, the score distribution over the years, and the trend of the score admission line of each major in each university over the years, so that the machine can automatically summarize the most credible model prediction results from the college entrance examination scores over the years. Of course, the prediction results given by AI are more of a reference, and the final decision is definitely in the hands of the candidates and parents."

“My past was filthy and not worth boasting about, but today I am unrestrained and have boundless thoughts. I ride my horse at a gallop in the spring breeze, and see all the flowers in Chang'an in one day.” Entering an ideal university is the goal of every student who studies late into the night. Some people think that hobbies should be given priority, while others think that employment is the gold standard. Standing at the crossroads of life, there is no standard answer and no need for AI empowerment. The answer is actually in our own hearts.