Turnitin is also talking to the Common Application about using its services - raising the possibility that it could soon make inroads into the undergraduate market. One is a medical school one is another business school and the others are all graduate and professional schools. The company recently introduced a new software service for admissions essays, for which it is gathering admissions essays that will go into a database to be checked (along with various other Web resources and student papers).Īccording to the company, a handful of other admissions offices have also signed up, although those admissions offices don't necessarily want anyone to know. So the Penn State business program has become the first college or university program to go public about using a new admissions essay service offered by Turnitin, the dominant player in the plagiarism detection software for reviewing work submitted by college students. 'After this year, we knew the problem was real and we had to do something,' said Marcinkevage. This year, because 30 applicants plagiarized using the same essay, it was clear to Penn State that this problem isn't about just a few outliers. She described receiving essays in the past in which most of the application was in one font, but the essay was not only in a different voice but a different font, as if an applicant couldn't even be troubled to try to hide his dishonesty by changing fonts. Thirty applicants submitted essays that either lifted many passages straight from the article or substantially paraphrased the article without appropriate attribution.Ĭarrie Marcinkevage, the program's admissions director, said she knew even before the most recent incident that some applicants plagiarized - often badly. One of the topics for application essays referenced the business school's idea of 'principled leadership.' Some applicants apparently Googled the term and came up with an article about the concept in a publication of a business school association. program at Pennsylvania State University to figure out that they had a plagiarism problem this year. It wasn't that hard for admissions officers for the M.B.A.

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