The 8 Ivy League Schools Have 8 Different AI Policies

Harvard and Brown are the only Ivy League schools classified at L4 — an outright prohibition on AI use in application materials. Both also require D3 attestation, meaning applicants must certify they did not use AI.

Harvard's admissions office explicitly equates AI-generated essay content with plagiarism and fraud under the Common App policy. Brown states that AI is "not permitted under any circumstances" in conjunction with application content, with a narrow exception for basic spelling and grammar checks.

Four Ivies land between full prohibition and silence. Yale (L3) allows grammar checks and topic brainstorming but considers AI-composed content “application fraud.” Cornell (L3) and Dartmouth (L3) similarly restrict AI to brainstorming only — you can use AI to think, but not to write.

Columbia (L2) takes a more moderate stance, permitting line-level editing and paraphrasing while requiring that applications remain an "accurate and authentic representation" of the applicant.

Notably, none of these four schools require disclosure (all D0). The rules exist but there's no formal mechanism asking students to report AI use.

Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania have no AI-specific admissions policy at the institution level (L0/D0/E0). Neither school's admissions website addresses AI tools directly.

The absence of policy is itself a finding. Students applying to Princeton or Penn receive no institutional guidance on whether or how to use AI in their applications. The Common App's fraud policy still applies, but the schools themselves are silent.

Institution-level codes tell only part of the story. Several Ivy League schools have program-specific policies that diverge significantly from the school-wide stance. Columbia is a striking example: while the institution is L2, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts, and the Law School all operate at L4 — a full prohibition.

Applicants targeting a specific program should always check the individual school detail page for program-level overrides.

The Ivy League's lack of consensus means applicants cannot assume a single approach will work across all eight schools. A student applying to both Harvard (L4 — no AI) and Princeton (L0 — no policy) faces fundamentally different expectations.

The safest strategy: check each school individually, default to the most conservative interpretation when in doubt, and remember that the Common App's fraud policy applies regardless of whether a school has its own AI rules.