One of the great things Turnitin does is that once you put a document in, it becomes part of its database. Essentially, they (some MBA applicants) are just plagiarizing it. Our initial hypothesis is probably going to take longer to prove out. What we actually found is just wholesale copying of massive chunks of stuff from websites or taking it out of articles or Wikipedia. “So our initial hypothesis was that the same essays would show up and be recycled by the consultants. But quite a few of them either write the essays themselves or pull them out of catalogs. “Many of these consultants are ethical and do the right thing. “We’ve had a concern for awhile that there has been an increasing use of these so-called consultants who help applicants with their applications,” he added. More than 100 colleges and universities are now using the software, including such graduate schools as Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, Northeastern and Iowa State. Staffers at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business two years ago discovered 29 essays about “principled leadership” that contained material lifted from the Web.ĬONCERN OVER THE GROWING USE OF ADMISSIONS CONSULTANTS PROMPTED UCLA’S REVIEWĪt Anderson, Ainslie said, the school decided to begin using the software due to the increased use of admission consultants and essay editing services for MBA candidates. This is the first year the Anderson School began checking essay questions with anti-plagiarism software from a company called Turnitin. The software compares applicant essays to an archive of other writings. All I would be doing is to allow them to compound one lie with another lie. “I don’t want to enter that conversation. Rather than confront the applicants with the issue, the school chose to simply ding them.

In an interview with PoetsandQuants, Senior Associate Dean Andrew Ainslie said the school’s admission office detected 12 plagiarists in its first round and 40 more in the second round. UCLA’s Anderson School of Management said that it has rejected 52 MBA applicants in the school’s first and second admission rounds for plagiarizing their MBA application essays. Senior Associate Dean Andrew Ainslie found wholesale copying

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