At what length would you go to get into college? Would you copy or pay for material to put on your application? A new study by CFL Software Development, authors of the CopyCatch suite of detection programs, reveals that 5% of applicants were caught using ‘borrowed’ material on their Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) applications.

The research was performed at the request of UCAS to determine how many applicants would seek Internet help for the personal statement section on their application.

Nearly 800 medical applications were found to contain key phrases that were found on 3 Internet ‘example’ statements.

Among the applications:

• 370 contained a statement starting with: “..,a fascination for how the human body works…”
• 234 contained a statement relating a dramatic incident involving “…burning a hole in pajamas at age eight…”
• 175 contained a statement which involved “…an elderly or infirm grandfather…”.

This ‘borrowed’ Internet material was more common among those who submitted their application as the deadline approached, and was identified to most likely appear at the end of the applicant’s statement. 

There were very few applicants (less than 1%) who directly copied material from the web, as opposed to just using key phrases.

Anthony McClaran, UCAS Chief Executive, said: “We are pleased to see that plagiarism is not rife in applications and that few applicants are paying to plagiarize. We take the integrity of applications very seriously and commissioned this work to investigate the potential for screening applications for borrowed material in the future. As part of our ongoing commitment to maintaining integrity standards we will shortly be doubling the size our Verification Unit which is responsible for identifying fraudulent applications”.

The study also examined whether or not the applicants from each university had similar phrases; this was to target those who may have used a particular ‘university template’ in their application; however, the research showed small evidence of the types of similarities that would arise.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 5:28 pm under Internet.

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