"Finding Applicants Who Plagiarize "

cptofthehouse
Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:01:51 +0000

Some of my sons’ essays were so patched together, they looked like quilts. Lots of different fonts there. Also if you quote things, and use standard phrases, you can blip on the screen as a possible plaglarizer. I don’t believe that every single essay is carefully read. Just doing the math on the number of admissions employees are there, the number of essays submitted and the key time between Jan and end of March when not only do the entire apps have to be examined, but essays read, decisions made, it just isn’t possible with the number of hours in a day. In addition, the adcoms have to start welcoming the kids and families of the juniors looking at colleges, and they do. When I visited colleges during those time periods, I did not find a bunch of admissions folks pounding salt reading essays. Nor did they appear like they were burning a lot of midnight oil. Most apps get less than 10 minutes perusal. It’s the borderline cases, especially if the student involved has some attribute the school wants but s/he is n’t quite on the admit criterion that involve all of those lengthy council decisions that are often featured as how admissions work.

That is why it concerns me if the adcoms are going to just run essays through a plagiarism program. It can take a lot of time and concerted effort to catch some plagiarized work. You don’t always get a bunch of essays that match among the stack, nor is it always obvious. Young kids tend to talk alike anyways. I"ve read a lot of kids’ essays and there is a sameness there that makes it difficult to catch if someone wrote the whole danged thing. Especially since many of these essays are being edited to the whazooie.

My kids wrote their own essays, and hardly changed a thing when they were edited, but that was not the case with most kids. By the time mom and dad, the English teacher, the Essay tutor, the friend who once worked with admissions, the guidance counselor and any other adult that seems to know something gets through with these essays, it’s hard to say who wrote what.

I think adcoms should refrain from making remarks about essays too. When they start eliminating the subjects and stories that typical high schoolers do own, the essays start getting extremely contrived. One young lady wrote some idiot stuff about Cpt Crunch serial, trying to be precocious and original. Her topics about her parents divorce and grandmother’s death, both heavy on her mind and things that are very much part of her were considered trite and stereotypical. So she writes about CPt Crunch?

I really think that the essay should be another SAT2 type session, where the kids write under proctors, or at the colleges during the visits. That way you know you have the kids’s original writings. I like that the SAT2 has the writing section there. I wonder if the adcoms are comparing those excerpts to the sanitized essays on the apps. I would do so just to see the differences.