In 2017, Business Week magazine published a news story on Smeal College of Business, a part of Pennsylvania State University, that discovered several plagiarized application essays for its graduate program. Sadly, plagiarism in the admission essay for graduate and undergraduate programs exists beyond this business college and is even present outside the United States.
Plagiarism
Simply put, plagiarism is making other peoples ideas and words seem as if they are one’s own. This problem has existed for a long time and in all forms of literature, not only in essays but also in poetry, in songs and all sorts of written work.
These days, furthermore, the problem of plagiarism in the academic setting has increased because there is a lot of writing available on the Internet. Not
only are there more sources of ideas and words available, but word processing software has made it easy to highlight or mark passages from Internet sources, copying, and pasting them into students work. In addition to the admission essay, this problem also happens with regular term essays, term papers, school homework and other writings.
Software and other more comprehensive services have been developed to remedy such issues. As the Internet gains popularity among students to make plagiarism a more or less commonplace problem in the schools, so will anti-plagiarism technology continue to evolve.
Why plagiarize?
Although there are many reasons to use free plagiarism checker here, a major reason for its presence in student writing is the need to sound serious or learned. Admittedly, many teachers and professors put a lot of importance to such things and as a result, many plagiarized writing has gotten high grades.
Some students also resort to plagiarism to reach assigned lengths or word counts in their essays. Others have done this because of lack of time for research, for thinking up a coherent idea, or such things.
By whatever reason, they provide the first steps of a vicious cycle.
Particularly in writing an admission essay for graduate or undergraduate programs, plagiarism has a sad component since these are supposed to show what kind of people the students are and what they are capable of becoming. Using other peoples; words hide those from the readers.
Searching for the right ones
Admission boards are faced with a big problem regarding plagiarism. However, like many issues concerning education, this is a complex problem with many components that have to be examined. Acknowledgment of the problem; existence and the development of short-term remedies can be the first steps towards a solution but the battle, so to speak, has just begun.
