<p>What I found disturbing was this: “In a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the researchers report finding “evidence of plagiarism” in 5.2% of such essays by applicants to Brigham’s internal medicine, anesthesiology, general surgery, OB-GYN and emergency medicine residency programs between Sept. 2005 and March 200”</p>
<p>The intellectual property issue is a big one. Turnitin stores all submitted papers in its database to compare against future papers, and students must pay by the page to have their papers–their own work that they wrote!–removed from the database. </p>
<p>If turnitin were widely used among college admissions offices, the problem of self-plagiarism resulting in false positives would be even more common than previous posters have suggested. If Johnny writes an essay and submits it (with perhaps a few tweaks here and there) to two different schools, the plagiarism detector at the second school will announce that Johnny has copied the essay. Now, in academic classes students are not supposed to self-plagiarize work from other classes, but it is widely accepted that students may submit the same admissions essay to multiple schools. </p>
<p>This is a sort of catch-22: if the program has no way to know the name of the student who wrote the original, it has no way to tell if it’s the same student submitting the second one. But if the program does have that access, it’s a pretty grave violation of student privacy. </p>
<p>Turnitin has a lot going for it, to be sure, but I think it might need to be adapted significantly for admissions purposes to resolve some of these issues.</p>
<p>It depends on the situation. If the essay was written by someone else, or if someone else changed entire paragraphs for the student, then I don’t see how that could be considered “proofreading”. One rule of thumb could be that the assistant should never write words on the paper. If they spot a typo, they can just circle it or use one of those proofreading marks that most of us learned in school and none of us actually use anymore. If a sentence is just poorly written (ie too passive, a run-on, etc.) then that can be jotted down separately or told verbally to the student. That seems like a good way to avoid accidentally (or not) writing an essay for the applicant while still giving them valuable help to put their best foot forward, so to speak.</p>
<p>All I can say is that if I were an adcom, I would find it hard to consider the essay as a major element, because I really can’t tell who wrote it. I simply don’t believe the claim that you can tell if the “voice” is really the student’s. How would you know if you can tell? I suppose the essay might be relevant if it conveys a piece of actual information that’s not elsewhere in the application, but I bet that’s fairly unusual.
In fact, it seems to me that only a really bad essay would make a difference. Everything from mediocre up to brilliant doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the applicant.</p>