UCLA Rejects 52 MBA Applicants For Plagiarism

UCLA Rejects 52 MBA Applicants For Plagiarism

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.

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