Ethics Newsline®

LONDON
Admissions officers at universities throughout the United Kingdom, including prestigious institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, are discovering that applicants routinely are cutting and pasting stock phrases copied from the Internet into their application essays.

The London-based Independent reports that about 5 percent of the 50,000 applications tested with a plagiarism-detection software contained wording copied from websites that offer advice on the application process, including examples of personal essays.

According to a report from IT Week, about 234 applicants to medical schools identically professed that their interest in science began accidentally after an accident with a chemistry set that involved “burning a hole in my pajamas at age eight.”

The London Evening Standard reports that the recent wave of plagiarism is part of a larger trend noted throughout the U.K. academic community and is being fueled by stiff competition and record numbers of applicants.

The Evening Standard reports that there has been a wave of plagiarized applications from abroad as well, sometimes as part of a scam by immigrants who have no intention of enrolling in classes and disappear once they are admitted on a student visa.

Scotsman education correspondent Kevin Schofield poked around some of the admissions-help websites and found that in addition to offering collections of personal essays for perusal, one provides guidance on how to not get caught, including the advice, “Don’t copy the sentences you find outright, change them or write your own sentence in a similar style.”

The study found that the number of plagiarized applications rises sharply as the deadlines grow closer.