UCLA Rejects 52 MBA Applicants For Plagiarism

Poets and Quants:

UCLA's Anderson School of Management said that it has rejected 52 MBA applicants in the school's first and second admission rounds for plagiarizing their their MBA application essays. In an interview with PoetsandQuants, Senior Associate Dean Andrew Ainslie said the school's admission office detected 12 plagiarists in its first round and 40 more in the second round.

Rather than confront the applicants with the issue, the school chose to simply ding them. "We just reject it," Ainslie told P&Q. "I don't want to enter that conversation. All I would be doing is to allow them to compound one lie with another lie. I'm sure they'll have stories for us."

This is the first year the Anderson School began checking essay questions with anti-plagiarism software from a company called Turnitin. The software compares applicant essays to an archive of other writings. More than 100 colleges and universities are now using the software, including such graduate schools as Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, Northeastern and Iowa State. Staffers at Penn State's Smeal College of Business two years ago discovered 29 essays about "principled leadership" that contained material lifted from the Web.

Read the whole story: Poets and Quants

Comments

[Globalmbareport]

11:38 AM on 02/11/2012

It is well known that plagiarism is not something that is tolerated in universities whether Executive MBA's, other post graduate degrees or graduate qualifications. Educational authorities have high sophisticated analysis tools to capture anyone who tries to copy other academics work.

Nigel P
www.globalmbareport.com

[mayaoyvey]

07:19 AM on 02/03/2012

And then of course everyones application essays end up in TurnItIns database, which has been aggregating original work for some time and has very ambiguous use policies for it, using original works by people for its profit generation, engaging in a type of plagiarism and violation of student/author copyright. As students are a captive audience with no choice but to comply or fail, universities can partner with this company to reduce the "burden" on professors to actually evaluate work rather than scan it, without the ability of students to assert control over their works. I wonder if the university notifies applicants that their original works will be transmitted to and retained by a third-party, for-profit database and used to further said companys profit.

[tploomis]

03:06 AM on 02/03/2012

What irony -- 29 incidents of plagiarism on the subject of "principled leadership."

[nmeemn]

09:25 PM on 02/02/2012

Turnitin is AWESOME. It's incredible that people at this stage of their life have to resort to buying papers from paper mills, lifting things directly off the web (like wikipedia), or asking others to write papers. How do they expect to survive?

[J R M]

12:58 AM on 02/05/2012

By hiring consultants.

Managers do it all the time.

[nmeemn]

07:43 PM on 02/05/2012

I meant survive grad school.