Don’t cut and paste “model” personal statements from the internet. And don’t use the old “burnt my pajamas when I was 8-year old” story. They’re on to you:
Five per cent of applicants, equivalent to 25,000 of this year’s 500,000 total, resorted to cutting and pasting sentences from model personal statements from the internet this year, according to the survey by Ucas, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. Unfortunately, most lifted material from the same web-site, studential.com, making their transgressions as easy to spot as an elephant in an elevator.
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We’ve actually had clients who hired us to help them with their personal statements give us their drafts which were, upon further examination, plagiarized from the samples we have on our own website! We read them the riot act and explain why that’s no way to get into residency.
They are trying to get into medical school, but are too dumb to know that plagiarizing is wrong? Or that they might get caught?
The majority of the clients we catch plagiarizing are actually non-native English speakers. Everyone tells them to make sure they tell the program director what the program director wants to hear, so they try to find ways to express it using someone else’s words.
And so many people make the highly erroneous assumption that because it’s on the Internet, it’s not really stealing if you use it for your own purposes.
Taking non-copyrighted info from the internet isn’t really stealing, though it can be cheating/plagiarism.
True. I wasn’t saying stealing as in an illegal sense, but as in a moral sense.
Virtually everything written, in the united states, online, on paper or on a napkin for that matter, is protected by copyright laws. Section 506 of the us copyright law states that violation of the copyright law is considered criminal infringment if one of several situations take place, including: “private financial gain”. While not completely stright forward, it could eaisly be argued that taking the writing (that was protected by copyright) to help you succeed in your career (schools goal being career) was for financial gain.
I just wanted to point out that you always need to be careful with any information you copy from anywhere, as it often violates copyright laws and can be a criminal offense at times.
“They are trying to get into medical school, but are too dumb to know that plagiarizing is wrong? Or that they might get caught?”
Absolutely. In fact, my college roommate copied my term paper verbatim, in a course entitled “Social Ideals and Utopias” no less, and now is a successful pediatrician with a teaching position at a medical school. Yes he got caught, but the socialist professor merely lowered the maximum grade he could earn to a C in the course instead of turning him in.
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