The University of Cambridge is a signatory of the Russell Group statement on the use of AI in higher education. Students are permitted to make appropriate use of AI tools to support their personal study, research and formative work, however, using any unacknowledged content generated by AI within summative assessment as though it is their own work constitutes academic misconduct.
You may therefore wish to use AI tools as prompts for ideas or to assist in research when preparing your personal statement, but you should note that an over-reliance on AI carries risks:
- It may generate false claims (‘hallucination’). If these are about your personal achievements, they will be treated like any other application fraud.
- It may produce poor quality output, weakening your chance of success.
If invited to interview, you may be interviewed either online or in-person. Interviews are used to provide further information about your suitability to study at Cambridge. Any use of AI tools during an interview hinders this approach and is therefore prohibited.
Various methods will be used by interviewers to randomly check that AI tools are not being used. If there are serious concerns that your interview did not represent your own capabilities, this may put your application at a disadvantage.