For those going on to grad school, they would need to submit official transcripts indicating they have been awarded their degrees.

LLMs are okay if you already know the answer, because they don't have a basis for truth or a bias for source; they prioritize frequency of co-occurrence of words in the training data. They can produce very convincing and completely made-up text, or propagate "common wisdom" that isn't actually correct.

Using ChatGPT is pretty much the same as trusting one of the random AI-generated blogs poisoning the search results--which other people in this thread are complaining about the uselessness of.