But if 10% or more of the essay is plagiarized and not attributed, we’re turning down the applicant.” If someone takes six lines out of a Tennyson poem and attributes it to Tennyson, we’re happy with that. At least the interview is probably the most accurate picture that you’ll get of how someone will be when he or she are in class or sitting in an interview for a job.”Īsked if there was a dividing line beyond which an applicant would be immediately rejected for admission, UCLA’s Ainslie said, “We’re drawing a pretty conservative line. “It’s hard to know who you’re getting anymore. “There is a consultant for everything,” said Soojin Kwon Koh, admissions director at Ross. Yet another applicant actually took words from the Anderson School’s own website and plugged them into his submitted essay citing “exceptional academic preparation, a cooperative and congenial student culture, and access to a thriving business community.” It was published on Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s website as an example of a successful essay. In another example, one MBA candidate turned in a word-for-word copy of an essay written in 2003 for admission to Boston University’s business school. The only thing that was changed was the name of a country. In one case, said Ainslie, as much as 85% of an applicant’s essay was completely stolen from something published on the web. All told, the school found that 52 MBA candidates were lifting whole paragraphs from other, unattributed sources in their essays. And then it rejected another 40 applicants during its second round, which ended Jan. The upshot: UCLA’s business school rejected a dozen applicants for plagiarism during its first admission round, which ended Oct.
Essentially, they are just plagiarizing.” “What we actually found is just wholesale copying of massive chunks of stuff from websites or … of articles or Wikipedia. “So our initial hypothesis was that the same essays would show up and be recycled by the consultants,” added Ainslie. It would use software from a company called Turnitin to scan the essays and see if they contained passages that had been used before in other essays or somewhere on the web. So for the first time, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management decided to put all the essays submitted by applicants to a test. 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 a while that there has been increasing use of these so-called consultants who help applicants with their applications,” said Ainslie.
Some now estimate that as many as half the applicants to Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton now employ consultants to give them an edge in polishing their applications to business school. Like many of his business school colleagues, the senior associate dean of UCLA’s MBA program had watched the fairly significant rise in admission consultants over the years.
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