Michigan Law Optional Essays - The AI Prompt 10
Michigan Law takes one or two optional essays from a list of ten. One of them must be answered using generative AI. How to pick, and how to answer it.
Michigan Law Optional Essays - The AI Prompt 10
Michigan Law will read one or two optional supplemental essays from you, "but no more," each "between one and two pages," each headed with the number of the prompt it answers. Nine of the ten prompts sit inside a general rule against drafting with generative AI. The tenth is captioned "Essay Ten - TO BE ANSWERED USING GENERATIVE AI," and if you choose it you are expected to use those tools — which means the choice you make on this list changes which authorship rule applies to the document you are writing. Essay One is the why-Michigan slot and is read like any other why-school essay; Essays Two, Three, and Five are read for what you carry.
That is the decision this page is about: which two to send, in what pairing, and — if you send Essay Ten — how to answer a prompt that requires AI without contaminating the rest of a file where the same tools are ruled out. Every prompt below is quoted from Michigan's own admissions page as we read it on September 1, 2026; the one thing we could not read today — the certification inside the annotated application — is described rather than dressed up as a quote. Michigan's row in the wider map is in the 2026-27 law school essay prompts crosswalk, and if you want the whole file read against a rubric rather than a checklist, that is our law school personal statement review.
The list, and what changed for 2026-27
Ten prompts, all published on Michigan's own page and all quoted here verbatim as we read them on September 1, 2026. Michigan names them "Essay One" through "Essay Ten", not "1" through "10". Numbering shifts between cycles when prompts merge, so confirm it in the form before you head an essay.
| Essay | Michigan's words | Changed for 2026-27 |
|---|---|---|
| One | "Say more about your interest in the University of Michigan Law School. Why might Michigan be a good fit for you culturally, academically, or professionally?" | — |
| Two | "One of the goals of our admissions process is to enroll students who will enrich the quality and breadth of the intellectual life of our law school community, as well as to expand and diversify the identities of people in the legal profession. How might your experiences and perspectives contribute to our admissions goals?" | — |
| Three | "How has the world you came from positively shaped who you are today?" | — |
| Four | "Describe a quality, skill, or character trait you have and discuss how you expect it will help you in your legal career." | Merged from two earlier prompts |
| Five | "What is a closely held belief you have changed your mind about over time? Why?" | Reworded |
| Six | "If you had the ability to unilaterally legalize or criminalize something, what would it be and why?" | New |
| Seven | "Describe a challenge, failure, or setback you have faced and overcome, whether long-term and systemic (e.g., socioeconomic, health, or complex family circumstances) or short-term and discrete (e.g., a workplace scenario or a particularly demanding course). How did you confront it? What, if anything, might you do differently?" | — |
| Eight | "Think of someone who knows you, but doesn't know you well (i.e., not a family member or a close friend). How would they describe you? Would their description be accurate? Why or why not?" | — |
| Nine | "If you could have dinner with any prominent person, living or dead, who would it be and why? What would you discuss?" | — |
| Ten | "Essay Ten - TO BE ANSWERED USING GENERATIVE AI: Discuss how you have used AI to solve a real-world problem. How was AI helpful, and how was it lacking? Going forward, how will you approach the use of such tools?" | Rewritten |
Two cautions on that table. First, a widely reproduced older version of Essay Ten asked applicants how much they used generative AI tools day to day; that is the 2025-26 wording, it has been rewritten, and any page still presenting it as the current prompt is quoting a retired form. Second, the four "changed" flags are cycle-over-cycle observations from our own dated records, not Michigan's announcement — Michigan does not publish a changelog.
Picking two: a pairing logic, not a ranking
Michigan's cap is the constraint that does the work. You are not choosing your two best topics; you are choosing a pair that covers two different things a reader cannot get elsewhere in your file.
The pairing that fails most often is two essays doing the same job — Essay Two and Essay Three, say, both narrating the same formative background from slightly different angles. The reader learns one thing twice and loses the slot that would have shown something else.
A workable rule: one essay that shows fit or contribution, one that shows judgment.
| Slot | Candidates | What it buys you |
|---|---|---|
| Fit / contribution | 1 (why Michigan), 2 (contribution), 3 (where you came from) | A reason this file belongs at this school, or a specific thing you would add |
| Judgment | 5 (a changed belief), 6 (legalize or criminalize), 7 (a setback), 8 (an outside view of you) | Evidence of how you reason when you are not being flattered |
| Wildcard | 4 (a trait), 9 (dinner), 10 (the AI essay) | Range — useful only if the first two slots are already covered |
Two more constraints worth stating plainly. Your personal statement is already in the file, and Michigan's is uncapped by page count — the school's own guidance is that it imposes no page or word limit but that most personal statements run between two and four pages. If your personal statement already carries your why-law thread and your formative material, spending both supplemental slots on the same ground is the expensive mistake. And optional means optional: many applicants are admitted without sending any.
Essay One: the why-Michigan slot, and the school-swap test
Essay One — "Say more about your interest in the University of Michigan Law School. Why might Michigan be a good fit for you culturally, academically, or professionally?" — is the only prompt on the list that names the school, so it is the only one where a specific applicant-school connection is the actual job. The test is the one we run in every vertical: delete "Michigan" everywhere in the draft and paste in another school's name. If every sentence still reads true, the paragraph is about law school rather than about this law school. The full genre treatment — including the three failure modes this test catches — is in why the "why this law school" essay is invited, not required.
A constructed pair, written by us for this article, with school features left as placeholders because we never invent, name, or confirm a clinic, centre, course, or faculty member for you to reuse:
Fails the test. "Michigan Law's distinguished faculty, renowned clinical offerings, and collegial student culture make it the ideal environment for me to grow into the advocate I hope to become, and I know I would contribute a unique perspective to the community."
Passes it. "For three years I read denial letters for a county benefits office and could never tell whether the reasoning in them was the agency's or the vendor's. [Named clinic or course from the school's current listing] is where students argue those files rather than summarize them, and it is the specific thing I want two years of."
The second wins on its placeholders. They can only be filled from one school's live materials, and you have to fill them yourself — a review can read your sentence, but nothing we run can verify that a clinic exists, is currently offered, or takes students in your year.
Essays Two, Three, and Five: the ones read for what you carry
Essay Two asks "How might your experiences and perspectives contribute to our admissions goals?" and Essay Three asks "How has the world you came from positively shaped who you are today?" They look like one prompt and are not. Two asks forward — it wants a contribution arm. Three asks backward, uses the word "positively," and asks for no contribution at all. A draft written for one and submitted to the other usually ends with a paragraph answering a question that was not put.
Both are read the way a law perspective statement is read. Line-by-line worked versions of exactly this move — including one built to Essay Three — are in our law school perspective statement examples, and the reason these prompts are worded around experiences and the world you came from rather than categories is set out in the post-SFFA map of law perspective prompts.
Essay Five — "What is a closely held belief you have changed your mind about over time? Why?" — belongs to a different family: seven law schools now ask some version of tell us about a time you changed your mind, and each words it differently. The genre guide, with the other schools' prompts quoted side by side, is the changed-your-mind law school essay. The short version for Michigan: the essay is graded on the movement and its cost, not on which belief you landed on.
Essay Ten: answering a prompt that requires the tools the rest of the form rules out
Michigan publishes its general rule on the same page as the prompts, and publishes the carve-out in the same paragraph:
"In general, applicants ought not use generative artificial intelligence tools as part of their drafting process. (There is one exception to this rule, however, discussed below under 'Supplemental Essays.')"
The exception is Essay Ten, captioned "Essay Ten - TO BE ANSWERED USING GENERATIVE AI." Michigan also states, in the same passage, that applicants remain welcome to use ordinary electronic tools and to ask people for help:
"Applicants are nonetheless welcome to use electronic tools (like Grammarly or spellcheck), or may, similarly, ask pre-law advisors, mentors, friends, or others for basic proofreading assistance and general feedback and critiques."
Read together: at Michigan, human feedback on your writing is expressly welcome, generative drafting is not, and exactly one prompt inverts the second half of that. Michigan's own entry, with the carve-out recorded as a separate row rather than folded into a blanket ban, is on our University of Michigan–Ann Arbor AI policy page; how the other schools compare is on the law school AI policy lookup.
A workflow that keeps the carve-out contained
The risk with Essay Ten is not that you use AI. It is that the session bleeds — a tool you opened for Essay Ten ends up smoothing a sentence in your personal statement, and now you cannot honestly say the rest of the file is untouched. Six steps, in order:
- Finish everything else first. Personal statement, the other supplemental, addenda, résumé — all done and saved before you open a tool for this prompt. The carve-out is one document wide.
- Work in a separate file. Not a tab of the master document, not the same working file with a heading. A separate file with a separate name.
- Bring a real problem you already solved. The prompt asks how you used AI to solve a real-world problem — past tense, an actual task from your work, study, or volunteering. It is not an invitation to invent a use case for the essay.
- Log the session as you go. Keep the specific task, what you asked for, what came back, and what you had to correct. That log is your evidence, not your essay.
- Answer all three clauses. How it helped. How it was lacking — this is the clause weak answers skip. And how you will approach such tools going forward. A concrete failure you caught is worth more than an abstraction about limitations.
- Never paste a transcript. A conversation log is not an essay. It also spends a page and a half of a two-page limit on text you did not write.
A constructed outline for Essay Ten
Beats, not prose. Constructed by us for this article and deliberately not written out, because a finished model answer to a prompt about your own judgment is the one thing that cannot be borrowed. Roughly two pages when drafted.
- The task, in one sentence with a date and a number. A real, bounded problem — reconciling two inventory exports, drafting a first pass at a translation glossary, sorting eight hundred survey free-text answers into categories.
- Why you reached for a tool at all. What the alternative was and what it would have cost in hours or accuracy. This is where a reader decides whether the choice was reasoned.
- What you asked for and what came back. Specific. Name the operation, not the brand mythology.
- The helpful part, measured. What it actually saved, stated conservatively. A modest, checkable claim beats a big one.
- The lacking part, with an instance. The concrete failure: a category it collapsed that should have stayed separate, a confident answer that was wrong, a pattern it could not see because it had no access to the thing you knew.
- How you caught it. The check you ran. This beat is the essay's spine — it is the difference between an applicant who uses tools and one who supervises them.
- The cost you would not pay again. The tradeoff you now price differently, in one sentence.
- The going-forward rule. Not "I will use AI responsibly" — a rule specific enough that someone could watch you follow it: what you will let a tool do first, and what you will never let it do last.
The certification, and what we cannot quote
Michigan's annotated application for the 2026-27 cycle sets out the certification an applicant signs. Our record of it — from an earlier read, not from today — is that it attests no generative AI was used in the written submissions, with an exception for optional essay prompt ten. We are describing that document, not quoting it, and we are not presenting that record as re-verified. When we tried to re-read the 2026-27 annotated application on September 1, 2026, the PDF returned a server error on every route we tried. We do not quote a form we have not read. Read the exact wording in your own application before you check the box — it governs over any summary, this page included. If you decide a disclosure is appropriate anywhere in your file, our AI disclosure generator produces a plain statement of what you used and where; whether to include one is your call and your school's rule, not ours.
One more thing worth stating because it is easy to get backwards: answering Essay Ten is not a disclosure that you used AI on the rest of your application. It is an answer to a prompt that asked you to. Those are different claims, and the certification is where the second one lives.
Which of these a rubric can actually read
Straight answer, because the boundary matters more than the pitch. Essay One is read against the why-school essay rubric. Essays Two, Three, and Five are read against the perspective statement rubric. Essays Four, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine are short open-topic pieces with no dedicated law rubric of ours; a review of one of those is read against the closest fit, which is a partial answer and we would rather say so.
Essay Ten has no rubric, and we are not going to invent one. It is a prompt about your judgment in using a tool, scored by a school on evidence we cannot see. What a review can do with it is ordinary and limited: read whether all three clauses are answered, whether the "lacking" clause has an instance in it, and whether the going-forward rule is specific. That is editorial reading, not a score.
For everything else, our law school personal statement review reads writing you already wrote against the prompt and limits you paste above it: two free Quick Reviews a day, or your first Full Review for $5, typically ready in about 2–3 minutes; Pro includes ten Full Reviews for $50. Every Full Review includes an AI-authenticity check, which is a signal and not proof — it is a reason to re-read your own sentences, never evidence about anyone's authorship, and we do not offer anything that rewrites text to evade a detector.
Read the rule before you decide what to do with any draft. Your school's current authorship, AI, and assistance rules sit on its own pages and inside the certification you sign; they differ school by school and change by cycle, and the sentence you sign governs over any summary, including this one. Do not use a review where your school prohibits it. Submit only your own writing. GradPilot reviews writing you already wrote and never drafts replacement prose; what you do with feedback under your school's rule is your call. Our guide to law school application AI policies is the lookup surface we maintain for the patchwork, and the rest of the law essay shelf sits on the law school essays hub.
Before you submit
- Open the live application and copy every prompt you are answering, with its number, exactly as the form words it. Numbering moves between cycles.
- Send one or two. Not three, and not two that do the same job.
- Put the prompt number at the top of each essay, as Michigan asks.
- If you write Essay One, run the school-swap test and verify every school-specific detail on Michigan's current pages.
- If you write Essay Ten, finish everything else first, work in a separate file, keep a log, and answer the "lacking" clause with an instance.
- Read the certification in the form before you check the box.
Sources and retrieval notes. Every Michigan sentence quoted above — all ten supplemental-essay prompts, the "one or two (but no more)" rule, the one-to-two-page rule, the prompt-number rule, the personal-statement guidance, and the writing-integrity paragraph with its AI sentence and carve-out — comes from Michigan Law's Apply to the J.D. Program page, read on September 1, 2026. That page returns HTTP 403 to direct command-line requests; we read it through a text proxy, and the wording matches our earlier dated reads of 2026-08-10 and 2026-08-27. The 2026-27 annotated application PDF (annotated-application-2026-27-a11y.pdf) returned a server error on every route we tried on 2026-09-01 — retrieval blocked — so the certification is described from an earlier record, is not re-dated to today, and is never quoted. The 2025-26 version of Essay Ten is retired and is not reproduced here. Nothing on this page is legal advice, nothing here predicts an admissions outcome, and no AI-detection result is evidence of authorship.
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