MBA adcoms monitor essay plagiarism - 工管

MBA Admissions Staff Monitor for Plagiarism in Application Essays

Posted by CA


Following the disclosure earlier this year by UCLA Anderson School of
Management that it rejected 52 applicants to its MBA program under suspicion
of plagiarism, more business schools are turning to paid services that can
detect when prospective applicants try to pass off pre-canned work as part of
their own application essays, a Financial Times article reports this week.

At UCLA Anderson, detecting plagiarism among applicants was an unanticipated
result of going digital with its application process. Anderson’s admissions
staff this year began reviewing all applications using iPads. “Once we went
digital, all kinds of possibilities opened up, including the option to run
admissions essays through Turnitin,” Andrew Ainslie, Anderson’s senior
associate dean, told the FT.

Turnitin, one of several detection software programs available to higher
education institutions, has the largest English-language database with 20
billion web pages, 110 million “scholarly items” secured through
partnerships with publishers and 200 million papers submitted to the service,
the FT reports. According to iParadigms, which markets Turnitin, more than 70
percent of higher education institutions in North America and almost 95 per
cent in the United Kingdom have a Turnitin license.

Used initially more for coursework, admissions staff at institutions that
have a Turnitin license can check application essays against the database to
receive a plagiarism percentage score. At UCLA Anderson, the decision was to
reject applicants whose scores suggested they had plagiarized more than 10
percent of their admissions essays.

According to the FT report, plagiarism among MBA applicants may be on the
rise even as business schools attempt to refocus matriculated students on
ethics and honor codes following the financial crisis. “Places on
exceptional MBA programs are scarce commodities and the economic return is so
substantial that some people are prepared to risk and to try things that
would gain them an unfair advantage,” Dave Wilson, chief executive of the
Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the
GMAT entrance exam, told the FT. For its part, GMAC has invested heavily in
biometric palm-vein technology to deter cheating on the GMAT.

Some schools find that simply introducing Turnitin or another detection
software leads to a drop in plagiarism, according to the FT. At the UK’s
Grenoble Graduate School of Business, Turnitin’s introduction has led to a
drop in plagiarism from about 1 in 10 essays to 1 in 100, Patrick O’
Sullivan, the school’s director of studies, told the FT. “We noticed
initially a rise – because we were detecting more,” he said. “And then a
fall in the last two years – particularly dramatic in the last year. It
seems the word has got out among students.”

Not all schools have decided to use plagiarism detection software for the
application process, but more are considering it, the FT reports. “We talked
about the UCLA Anderson story here, to check whether we needed to do
something similar,” Elaine Romanelli, senior associate dean at Georgetown
McDonough School of Business, told the FT.

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