College applicants be warned- new software available to fight plagiarism
Fierce competition in college admissions could tempt an otherwise honest student to copy someone else’s personal essay or in haste simply share essay writing with a friend who is applying to a different college. Neither act is permitted in college admissions, and colleges are using new technology to catch cheaters.
Turnitin, a software company located in the Bay Area, has for a long time provided tools to high schools and colleges for catching plagiarism in research papers. Now, Turnitin has entered the college admissions arena to assist universities in identifying cheaters. About 100 undergraduate admissions offices have already signed up for the service.
Jeff Lorton, Product and Business Development Manager for Turnitin, in a recent interview explained how the software works. A plagiarist is caught by an admissions department through a process of scanning essays into a computer data base shared by participating colleges. Within minutes, an essay is given a score–a percentage of the document that is matched to another applicant’s essay. College admissions officials can then open a report and compare one essay to another. The essay of an applicant to College A might be a match for an essay submitted to College B, but the software doesn’t tell the university if one applicant copied another’s essay, or if two students collaborated on one essay and submitted it to different colleges. Turnitin is not used to inform either university, in this example, of the identity of the matched applicant or where that college that essay was submitted. One university admissions office wouldn’t be able to inform another office that there was a duplicate essay being circulated.
Lorton said, “Turnitin is one more tool to allow admissions to make better decisions.” Turnitin doesn’t disclose the colleges who subscribe to their service, and most colleges don’t inform students that they use this technology.
Not all universities are joining in, at least not for now. Stanford University is considering working with Turnitin in the future, or perhaps on a limited trial basis, according to Bob Patterson, Director of Admissions. Patterson commented that Stanford works under the assumption that students are honest. In fact, this year they randomly selected fifty students chosen for Early Admission. Stanford contacted each student’s high school counselor to verify that all the information a student provided about his or her activities and achievements were true. Patterson said not a single applicant from that random sample had been dishonest.
So as the college application season opens , here’s a bit of advice for students and counselors–don’t share essays on the internet, through email, or through any medium where it can be easily duplicated. Although that seems like simple common sense, last year a counselor sent out her own child’s University of California essay to the entire senior class of her high school, presumably to show them what she thought was an excellent writing sample. That essay could have easily been copied and submitted to thousands of universities, and perhaps it was. This time around, however, thousands of students could have their applications simply discarded.