UCLA MBA applicants rejected for plagiarism

[CageFree]

I usually hang in the History forum... but I saw this article: http://poetsandquants.com/2012/02/01/ucla-rejects-12-mba-applicants-for-plagiarism/ and thought it'd be interesting as a discussion topic.

Apparently, they are now using Turnitin to check those SOPs, and found 52 people had plagiarized their SOPs.

Thoughts?

[mandarin.orange]

Thanks for the link! It led me to the original LA Times article, which I thought was better.

Turnitin is a fantastic piece of software; I used it last year while teaching high school, and required students to submit work via the website. It changed my LIFE. For students, just the knowledge that they were submitting to a site that scanned electronically for plagiarism curbed most of it. I'm amazed that UCLA Anderson STILL had 12 blatant cases - those applicants are numbskulls!

In this article, though, they mention a result of 10% setting off alarm bells. It is really, really easy for the software to get false positives. Occasionally I'd have kids hitting as much as 40%, access the results to see why, and find nothing damning. I will add that annotated bibliographies and lab reports were my recurring assignments, the nature of which lends itself to an acceptable level of *some* duplication. For the bibs, students' citations were often duplicated somewhere on the web, and turnitin recognizes that as 3 lines of identical writing. And, in a "Methods" section for a lab report, there are only so many ways for a 9th grader to write up a simple, standard lab procedure.

[CageFree]

Oh, that's good to know. I'm a high school teacher (hopefully, won't be next year ) and students have to do a big research project in one of our GATE-type programs. They have been using Turnitin and this year someone was caught... copied everything pretty much off of websites, word by word. Now the parents are furious because the student got a zero on that paper and will fail the class... and they are accusing the teacher of lying.

Incidentally, the teacher in question has a Ph.D. in History.

Edited February 3, 2012 by teachgrad

[hope4fall2012]

Wow!!! This is scary!!! And suddenly I have another reason to worry myself crazy..

I know for sure that I didn't copy anything off anywhere, but a false positive is still a 1 in some number scenario (I don't want to be that 1 in some number.)

[mandarin.orange]

I'm a high school teacher (hopefully, won't be next year )

I wish you the best. Teaching in this country has such a dismal outlook now; it was a job I loved 3-4 years ago, but budget cuts, pay freezes, admin demands, and the constant pressure to do more with ever-decreasing resources...totally soured me on it.

Wow!!! This is scary!!! And suddenly I have another reason to worry myself crazy..

I know for sure that I didn't copy anything off anywhere, but a false positive is still a 1 in some number scenario (I don't want to be that 1 in some number.)

Hopefully, then, whoever is evaluating will have some sense of how sensitive it can be, and have a reasonable threshold. Hopefully they will look into why it's returning a certain value, which is an easy click or two of the mouse. (An example of what the reports look like.) You can also dial down it's sensitivity level and have it not pick up 3-4 word strings. In the LA Times article, it mentioned that adcoms for Stanford didn't worry about a certain threshold, just because of the high likelihood that people will use common expressions, quotes and platitudes in their essays for undergrad admissions.

[CageFree]

I'm soured on the profession as well, for the reasons you mentioned. I'm leaving after 8 years. Of course, the primary reason is that I put off grad school for too long

I saw that thread about funny things that students write.. unfortunately it turned into who knows what but.. I did want to share two funny things I've had over the year.

1. Beginning of a research paper: "Martin Luther King was the first African-American to have a dream."

2. On a test on the cold war, I had students write IDs. One answer to "Nikita Khrushchev" was "a black woman."

[coonskee]

I wonder what this will mean for students applying to college. When I was applying for undergrad, I only chose one place in the US - but I know a lot of people were applying to several, and using the same essay for different universities' applications. I wonder whether this will have any effect on candidates' chances now, since TurnItIn saves the essays that have been uploaded?

[socihealth]

This is an interesting article. Thanks for sharing it!

[wildviolet]

Oh, that's good to know. I'm a high school teacher (hopefully, won't be next year )

Me, too! This is my 11th year teaching, and I am ready to move on. Good luck!

[CageFree]

Me, too! This is my 11th year teaching, and I am ready to move on. Good luck!

You too! What do you want to do with your Ph.D.? Policy, curriculum, or..?