Several months back, some Brave Supplicants were mighty concerned about that earth-shattering news about the plagiarism-detection software some adcoms are using. We’re guessing that maybe the nervous reaction to this was born out of knowing that the essays submitted to a school weren’t entirely the BSer’s own…. in which case, well, perhaps the nervousness is deserved.
Or perhaps some BSers are nervous by nature.
To follow up on that previous series about this topic, we have another point to offer up:
Some schools were early adopters of this plagiarism software, including Penn State Smeal, who’s been using it since 2010.
Well guess what?
In May 2011, EssaySnark reviewed an essay from a Brave Supplicant who ended up accepted at Smeal. (Read the train of comments on that post to see how the saga unfolded.) Granted, the essay we reviewed was written for Darden – but everyone plagiarizes themselves in reusing essays written for one school to another, right? We don’t even have to see the Penn State essays to assume that there were traces of the Darden drafts lurking in them. Yet even with that draft posted here, this BSer had no trouble getting an offer at Smeal.
Do you really think that submitting an essay for review from EssaySnark is gonna hurt you in this process?
Or maybe the moral of this story should be: Only submit an essay for review here if you’re ready to do the work that will be required to transform it into something shining, sparkling, and new.
TJ says
train of comments? Where am I looking? Can’t see any.
essaysnark says
Sorry TJ – we’ve discovered that not all the comments survived the recent migration. We’re looking into a fix but it may be awhile before the techie stuff gets straightened out.
Alex says
Woah, I haven’t checked over here in a few months and everything is different! You’ve finally switched over to a real site rather than that old blogger site. Good move. Your stuff is so good that it definitely deserves its own domain.
essaysnark says
Alex!! Good to hear from you! and thx for the compliments on the new site, yes it’s exciting stuff!! Hopefully we’ll be able to spread more snark around this way!!
So… how’s things with you?? How’s the startup going? And now you’re a Publisher?!? WHOA DUDE! Cool stuff. What’s this summer about – startup efforts or a more traditional internship? Anything you wanna share would be great to hear about.
Alex says
Things are going well for me albeit crazy busy. I’m working on a software startup called Peoplematics (www.peoplematics.com) and yeah I have a paper to run now as well but that work is pretty light during the summer. I passed on traditional internship recruiting this past year which was pretty nice and I’ll do the same this upcoming year. No case interview prep for me!