B-Schools Fight Plagiarism with Turnitin

UCLA Anderson School of Management thas rejected 52 applicants to its MBA program  this year on suspicion they had plagiarised more than 10 per cent of their admissions essays, according to the Financial Times. 

Many business schools are now seeing an increase at the admissions stage. Turnitin software is the main weapon to detect cheating as it has the largest English-language database: 20bn web pages, 110m “scholarly items” secured through partnerships with publishers, and 200m papers submitted to the service. About 300,000 dissertations have just been added from ProQuest, the clearing house for English- language theses. Any thesis or dissertation published since 2008 is now indexed in the Turnitin database.

More than 70% of higher education institutions in North America and almost 95% n the UK have a Turnitin licence. Faculty staff checking essays against the Turnitin database are given a plagiarism percentage score, leaving it to them, or their institution, to decide what is acceptable.

Grenoble Graduate School introduced Turnitin to the school and this resulted in a drop in plagiarism from about 1 in 10 essays to 1 in 100.

Turnitin costs about $2 per student per year.

Some have questioned the ethics of a supplier that also markets software to students (WriteCheck) that enables them to check their work against the database – essentially arming both sides in the plagiarism war. 

Source: FT