I didn’t plagiarize my UChicago essay, but I did accidentally post it on college confidential temporarily. It is removed now, but when I submit it to Turnitin, it still detects the expired page, as it still appears on google searches. Only the link to the CC thread doesn’t work. Does UChicago likely use Turnitin to detect plagiarism. And when do they do it. Do they only do it during the advanced rounds when you’re almost accepted? I know Harvard will only scan essays of those accepted and contact you if there’s an issue. Does UChicago do the same thing? Is it also OK is I maybe include a note in my application about it, or will the college think I made a stupid mistake and reject me?
No advice, but very interesting. I don’t know how you would convince someone that you didn’t steal the essay from CC, if someone ended up thinking that.
I have the exact same problem. I posted my essay on essayforum and now it shows up on plagiarism checkers.
Does anyone know whether UChicago runs essays through plagiarism software?
Plagiarism checkers don’t use magic to find things cached on the Internet. They just use Google, or some other publicly available search engine. Which means that it doesn’t matter if Chicago uses Turnitin. Even if they have no other tools, they can have a work-study kid run a simple Google search.
Since you have no idea how long the search engines will keep the old data in their cache (they don’t update all pages at the same frequency) you should consider that essay toxic. Don’t use it.
What’s wrong with sending an e-mail to the admissions office simply telling them that you previously posted your essay and that this is happening? You could ask them if they’d prefer that you write another essay.
^ Like I said above, how would the admissions office know that the deleted online essay online was written by you? How would you convince them that you are the original author?
@WasatchWriter can I ask why you said “a work-study kid”?
OP, those essays are in fact toxic now.
^ Maybe regular admissions officers are too busy to sit there for hours just running essays through Turnitin.com? I could easily see delegating that to an intern or other younger employee. 
Shucks. bodangles nailed it.
Probably a toxic essay as of now. Ask to get it swapped out of your application. Should be possible
Why would you ever post your essay on the internet? That’s literally setting yourself up for doom.
No I doubt that they use Turnitin. Usually admissions essays are personalized. If it is consistent with the writing level indicated by your test scores and grades, I can’t imagine the fact that you had posted it would be a problem. Even if it is better than your grades would indicate, I can’t imagine it would be problematic.
@lostaccount I suspect these schools must have some sort of safeguard in place to catch plagiarized essays, because one can’t rely on an AO spotting the two similar essays among 30,000. If not Turnitin, another tool.
This seems pretty straightforward: contact the admissions office, tell them the situation, apologize and ask what to do. It strikes me as the far better course of action than having a “plagiarized!” on your application. (Unless of course you ACTUALLY plagiarized your essay to an extent that you are not mentioning here, in which case, uh, I suggest you give this one up.)
I can’t imagine that a reasonable school would automatically suspect plagiarism – surely this has happened before. The only potential issue is that someone else plagiarized from you and they don’t know who made the post on CC. If it’s just you, they can assume you made the post.