Doctoral applications
No more AI for application assessments
For seven years, an algorithm sorted application dossiers at a Texas university based on historical registration data. It’s been stopped now.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. Until recently, an algorithm was used to sort application dossiers here. | Image: zVg
After seven years, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin, US, has finally stopped using artificial intelligence to assess applications for doctoral studies. This was decided after the doctoral student Yasmeen Musthafa criticised the system on Twitter. According to its developers, this AI algorithm used ‘historical registration approval data’ that simply served to entrench existing inequalities.
The algorithm gave preference to students coming from elite universities as well as those with reference letters that used the words ‘best’ and ‘research’. By contrast, ‘good’ and ‘technology’ were assessed negatively. In the US journal Higher Ed, the University insisted that all applications had still been assessed by at least one human being.
