Calling all HBS Fall 2010 Candidates

April 8, 2010
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Exactly How Personal Is That Personal Statement?
Talk about chutzpah. The admissions director for Penn State’s M.B.A. program, Carrie Marcinkevage, recalls that the school once received a student essay with three of four paragraphs taken directly from an article online. “It was, ironically, in our ‘Principled Leadership’ admissions essay,” she says.

Turnitin, a company that exposes cut-and-paste malfeasance in term papers, is introducing a system to detect plagiarism on applications, and Penn State’s M.B.A. program is the first to sign up.

To demonstrate the program’s effectiveness, Turnitin conducted a test involving 450,000 applicants’ personal statements in an unnamed English-speaking country (not ours) and in January announced that it had found 70,000 “significant matches” with other material. Familiar phrases like, “I’m an ideal candidate for your college because …” won’t activate the alert, but if the rest of that sentence closely tracks someone else’s words, you’d be busted.

“We would call 15 percent of a personal statement matching other documents suspicious,” says Jeff Lorton, the company’s product and business development manager. According to a Turnitin data crunch, the odds of writing the same 16 words in the same order (not including and, of, a, the) by chance are one in a trillion.

The system looks for patterns in language more than identical words. So if you write “the system seeks patterns in language more than the exact same words,” you’d also be busted. Admissions offices will get a side-by-side comparison from which to make a final call: is it or isn’t it?

“Students applying to competitive colleges often have up to 15 different admission essays,” says Daniel Stern, founder of the Web-based College Essay Organizer. “When they confront the reality close to deadlines and feel so overwhelmed they don’t know where to start, they panic.”