Essays: 'borrowing' words, Part I

Today’s entry will be the first in a series examining admission essays and what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable ‘help’. How much help is too much? What kind of help is most useful? Are the changes to the Common Application questions going to alter the essay landscape? But first, a question that is seemingly simple enough. The answer, however, has some data driven opinions that are often not shared.

How do universities ensure that the essays they receive don't have any kind of plagiarism?

This question was posted on Quora.com for people like me to answer.

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As many people know, there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays. To check on an essay a person simply needs to cut and paste a part of the text into the site and if there are any matches they will show up.

When the first word string search engines were rolled out over a decade ago significant numbers of students, mostly in colleges and universities, were caught and charged with plagiarism.  Many were expelled. But cheating of this sort has not ended. Just this weekend the ongoing cheating scandal at Harvard continues to generate headlines in the New York Times.

But whether these scandals represent an increase in cheating among student is another matter. For example, over the course of many generations files were kept in fraternities at certain schools that contained papers written by ‘brothers’. As class sizes increased, and TAs often took over the role of graders, the chances of being caught for plagiarism were small; therefore, many students took advantage of these treasures. There is not enough data to make an informed guess as to how widespread this phenomenon was and still is, the more salient point is that the treasure troves once reserved for the few groups who could store and share them has now become an antiquated way of finding other’s words.  The practice of passing on papers is far from a dead art.

This past weekend I took part in interviewing students who were part of a focus group from a well-respected private high school. The topics we covered were varied but the subject of cheating did come up. I asked the students if teachers banned the use of Wikipedia for pares. The all said most of the teachers did. I then asked if the students still used Wikipedia anyway and all of them said yes. I knew the answer before the students responded but I am grateful for their openness in confirming what I have heard from virtually every student I have talked to over the last several years about this topic. Wikipedia is low-hanging fruit. And like the apple in the garden, a simple prohibition is not enough (and some would argue it is the prohibition itself is a part of the equation).

I realize I am being politically incorrect, but expecting students to ignore one of the greatest and largest sources of information in the history of the world seems unrealistic. Whether the information on many of the entries is correct is a separate issue, but the fact is that virtually any topic a teacher could assign will have Wikipedia entries that could prove useful. If nothing else many of the entries cite sources at the end of the entries that are clearly helpful. But establishing a game in which teachers know students are using Wikipedia but either pretend not to know or follow through and fail the few who do not know enough to paraphrase or change some of the data by referring to sources already creates a de facto acceptance of plagiarism. The current climate of creating rules that very few will follow instills a sense of de facto acceptance of plagiarism on the parts of students. I think that Wikipedia is too important and enticing a resource for students looking for quick sources of information. In a time when a Google search will often lead first to paid sites, and then to sites that charge money for access to materials, it is difficult to believe that educators would expect students not to take advantage of Wikipedia. Instead of forbidding the use of Wikipedia, I would encourage teachers to train students to use it in ways which will help them learn but also to instill in them a healthy skepticism of sources—something David Hume and many other skeptics of human knowledge would, I believe, agree is one of most important parts of learning about learning.

If what I have just written seems like a longwinded digression, I apologize. On the other hand, I mention this Wikipedia phenomenon in order to underscore what anyone living in the world today knows. We are awash in information and a great deal of it is just sitting out there on the Internet. More information has been generated in the last week on web than was compiled in the history of the human race until just very recently.

The surfeit of words applies to admission essay too. For example, I just did a quick search on Google for ‘sample admission essays for college’.  The number of results? 246,000. It would take longer than I have years left just to go through each of these to see what essays are there. But there are indeed essays out there. Jacque Steinberg, who gained famed for his wonderful book ‘The Gatekeepers, based in part on his NY Times job of following the fates of a select group of students from application to decision, has given snippets of great essays: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/today-essay/

I am guilty too. In the piece I wrote for US News on writing admission essays, I also include snippets of essays. It is a common practice. It is, therefore, all too easy for a student to find examples of ‘essays that worked’ to cite a title of a book that contains many essays written by successful candidates to highly selective schools.  The sheer number of these essays that are now on the web makes it possible for a student to find a great essay on virtually any topic. But I think that only a small percentage actually resort to plagiarism. Instead, what students often do when given an example of a great essay is to look past the creative voice and form that has been used well once and to see this structure as a roadmap to follow to a successful admission outcome. In other words, students adopt the formal approach of other students but change the words to fit their own experiences.

 The most famous admission essay ever, which I have posted on my blog before. Generated many an offspring.  While I have never seen a student submit this essay word for word I have seen many knock-offs. What happened after this essay went viral was that many teachers took this essay and used in in classes to demonstrate a creative approach to the essay. What some students learned, however, was not creativity; rather, they took the approach as a template for success. Instead of exactly quoting the various impossible feats of the essay, the writer made up other hyperbolic statements and then finish with the same sentence the original essay did: “But I have never been to college’. In talking with a few students I was told that the teachers had assigned them to do this. Whether the teachers meant for the student to send these assignments as admission essays was unclear, but the student took what they felt was a sure fire method of success and in the process doomed their chances for admission. Mimicking another’s voice and approach is not what colleges tend to look for in students. Examples of great essays are great for helping to give writers inspiration but imitation of this sort will not convince anyone of the academic strengths a student might have and it will certainly not provide a reader with anything remotely approaching the student’s genuine voice.

Whether this counts as a strict form of plagiarism is debatable, but certainly the student who adopts a template for writing an essay whether it be a 5 paragraph McEssay or a wild romp like the one I have just cited, the student is simply pouring words in to a frame developed by others. A typical 5-paragraph essay is certainly not plagiarized but it is also not representative of a student’s voice either. But many essays that are now submitted have been lifted, in terms of form, by students seeking what has worked well for others. I do however think it is not in the best interest of students to train them to write admission essays from a template. And unfortunately, a number of people who are so called ‘experts' do indeed put forward strategies that are template driven. I believe this is one of the reasons that the vast majority of essays are virtually interchangeable with those submitted by other students. To craft a personal essay means: to devise an approach that fits the way the words work at the level of the sentence. We think in sentences as William Gass and other luminaries of writing argue so persuasively. So it is at the level of sentences that essays should be crafted. Starting from an overall template will almost always produce a McEssay.

The last point about plagiarized essays I wish to make is that I believe it is very unlikely that most people who do steal words will get caught. There are indeed many search tools to detect plagiarized essays but there is very little time to do the necessary detective work. Admission officers are under a huge time crush; therefore, it is unlikely that many of them will take the time to check on an essay unless something very odd stands out. If a student with very low testing and average grades in

English submits a Joycean essay, then it might get close scrutiny. But the reality is that very few essays get flagged in the overall scheme of things. But some do. The cost-benefit analysis then begins:  is it really worth the chance of getting caught? 

My story of plagiarism is almost too good to be true, but I have the email exchange to back it up. Several years ago I was reading an applicant who had impressive numbers and grades. I thought at that moment he had a real shot at getting in. Then as I read the essay I was sure I had read the words before. Actually, what happened was that this student had plagiarized my essay from the US News. Really. One of the paragraphs was word for word with my work. I wrote the student and he at first tried to defend it, but then disappeared from view. The odds of a student getting caught by the author for plagiarism in admission are slim but there are some ways of writing that will get close attention of the sort that may not help the student.

But it now seems as if those who resort to actual plagiarism are simply not up with the times. These students are those who are desperate or are unsophisticated in their approach. I would say based on my experience that the percentage of students at the low end of the economic scale often resort to plagiarizing essays more than do their wealthier peers in the pool. This is not because low income people are more likely to cheat; instead, the people at the top end have options for submitting essays that are not plagiarized. They are original essays. The problem is that the author is not the student himself or herself. For a fee, sometimes as high as six figures, writers of every stripe will come up with an essay. Some of them are quite good, and others laughably bad. This phenomenon will be the subject of part two of this series.