TL;DR How high schoolers get away with plagiarism when being accepted into college.

In today’s society, getting excepted to either a college or a university is the goal for most high school students. To get into these schools you need to have a good GPA, do well on your standardized test, which includes the ACT, and the SAT test, and writing your intro essays to get into school. Being a freshman at Allegheny college, I have felt the same pressures that the high school seniors are facing and went through it too. When I was writing my college essay, I had multiple topics to write about and it took me a couple of months to write it. But after all that, I wrote a very nice essay and got accepted into Allegheny College with that essay, and unlike many other essays that you normal have this essay came from a story in my past. Unlike other high school seniors, who are so pressured to get into college they risk cheating/plagiarize other peoples work and turn it into their own work. For the students that do this and get away with it, they skip the whole purpose of the college essay, which is to introduce you as a who you are, not who you want to be.

In today society, most people think that getting into college is mostly dealing with your test scores. Which is not actually true, when college admissions look at your resume they look at much more. Most colleges look at how high school student did in challenging courses, seeing the outside school activities they take part in, and they take advantage of opportunities of college application essay. Many colleges use free software like Turnitin to check to see if the students plagiarize when they were writing their essay. A study has been taken on the Turnitin software, and they found out of 450,000 admissions essays, that 44% of those essays had some type of “matching text”, and also had 36% of the essays had “significant matching text” to make it significant enough to suspect plagiarism. This is rather large number considering how many people get accepted into colleges around the United States. The colleges could also have all these papers caught for plagiarism by basically paying a $1 fee per paper, but that would add up considering there are millions of essays written per year.

For the colleges, paying the $1 essay is not an easy sell considering that they could just have their administrators to read over the papers to check for plagiarism and if they want to accept the students into their school. High schools seniors, of course, may also want to question on how in depth college administrators look into their college essays’. I have a solution for both of these problems put into one. In many small schools like, Allegheny College before the school accepts you into the school you have to have an one on one interview with an administrators, which I think they should do for all schools. One on One interviews allows the student to show who they actual are, and also allows the college to learn more about the student before accepting them into the school. So next time you do poorly on ACT, or SAT test don’t worry colleges will still want to look at your resume and eventually interview you, so don’t plagiarize on your college admissions essay.

Copyright license choice flickr photo by opensourceway shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license </small>

Standardized Test flickr photo by biologycorner shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license </small>