I was reading about how Penn State?s Smeal College of Business is using a newly-developed software to check to see whether or not your essays are plagiarized or not, and it freaked me out a little bit.

I'm currently getting ready to apply to b-schools, and have started writing a few essays... The problem is that I've been recycling sentences and phrases from essays and letters I've written in the past - mainly for my job search that has lasted far too long (and which I've had to write a good deal of letters for.)

I guess that my concern is that somehow these letters that I have written will make it to the database that the software checks against. How likely is this? Do you think that employers will voluntarily send the cover letters they receive to be included in the database?

And if so, what then? Will the school reject me because I'm recycling my own work? It's not like I'm copying somebody else, or having another person write my letters.

Am I being paranoid?

When a student submits an application in electronic format at a business school, the admission committee uploads the SOP in a global plagiarism checking database maintained by a company called Turnitin. Every premier Uni of the world has access to the software and everybody shares info on it. So lets say you submitted your essay at Smeal and the essay is your original piece of work...let say you get get admission at Smeal. Smeal will upload your essay in the global database. Now I being your friend you lend ur SOP to me so that I can get inspired by it and write my own. I took some of your sentences from ur essay and modified a few parts to form and apply to (say) London Business School. Upon receiving my application LBS will upload my SOP to the same database. The database software is fucking intelligent. It can even trace back the original essay among millions and shows up the similarity report. If the matches are more than 20% it is assumed that the essay is plagiarised and not only LBS will bar me for admission for that year but for life! Now this being a global software my name and other details will be flagged and I may be denied at most of premier b school. The most dangerous part is that since it will be your SOP to which the database search will refer to, you will be judged as a co-conspirator and Smeal will take action against you (may even result in expulsion).

The good news is however that if your job related essays have the benefit of never being inside that cursed database, you are free to recycle sentences from them...also either way both of them are your original works! Else be careful cz self-plagiarism also exists!!

Cover letters are never sent into that database cz many a times the CL issued at an organisation level are same old blah blah except the name of the employee changed...so no worries. No the employer won't sent them on their own, you need to nag them to sent it...one of my friend missed his Sloan admission cz his manager didn't send the letter/email.

ATB!!

_Nes

The good news is however that if your job related essays have the benefit of never being inside that cursed database, you are free to recycle sentences from them...also either way both of them are your original works! Else be careful cz self-plagiarism also exists!!

36 percent contained a ?significant? amount of matching text (more than 10 percent). Matches came predominantly from Web sites offering sample personal statements.