<p>From the Harvard Crimson:
College Uses Web Plagiarism Checks
Admissions office catches a ‘handful’ of plagiarists each year with online programs</p>
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As college applicants face escalating competition to get accepted to selective colleges, admissions offices—including Harvard’s—are increasingly using internet resources to catch plagiarism in application essays.</p>
<p>According to Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, the admissions committee tends to catch a “handful” of would-be plagiarists each year using electronic sources in addition to admissions officers’ judgment.</p>
<p>Occasionally, he said, attempts are “clearly obvious” to application reviewers, as when students copy college essay books word for word.</p>
<p>“There may well be instances that get by us every year. There’s no way to know for sure,” he said in a phone interview.</p>
<p>According to Fitzsimmons, students can, and a few likely do, purchase essays from various private sources. Electronic scanning sources cannot detect these works, since while they are not the students’ own, they are not technically unoriginal.</p>
<p>Fitzsimmons said that the College has been using online resources since they became available over a decade ago. But the admissions committee also depends, as it has since before these online resources became available, on admissions officers’ intuition.
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This past fall, the instructors in Sociology 189, “Law and Social Movements,” used Turnitin.com to scan students’ work as part of a plagiarism-detection pilot program run by Harvard’s Instructional Computing Group (ICG). The nine-year-old Web site, which added an admissions-essay service in 2004, has screened 27,000 admissions essays and found 11 percent to contain at least one-quarter of un-original material, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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