DreamApply Partners with Turnitin - automatic vs manual application essay reviews

So, it seems that Turnitin has decided to expand its research database by partnering with a European company that specializes in student application management systems. The partnership is supposed to streamline the work that the plagiarism program has to do by making it more efficient even while allowing it it access an increased number of databases.

In addition to that, the system will also allow Turnitin to scan essays submitted during the admissions process. I have no problem with the two companies partnering up for plagiarism checks.

I have a problem with them partnering up to ease the admissions process. I do not think automating the admissions process should be considered beneficial to the students, even if it does speed up the work of reviewers.

Admit it, software is still fallable. Therefore, it can easily mistake similar application essays for plagiarized work. That, would not be beneficial to the students.

While no actual explanation as to how the system will work was given, I still think that manual application essay reviews are better than automatic detection software.

I think it's pretty obvious that the real purpose is simply to detect plagiarized admissions essays and that the language about "streamlining the admissions process" is just standard PR doubletalk intended to downplay the main purpose of the venture and put a more positive spin on it.

However, these two statements seem to contradict one another:



In any case, in my educated opinion after having written at least 10,000 academic projects and hundreds of admissions essays, original admissions essays are substantially less likely to be flagged incorrectly as plagiarism than are original academic essays, precisely because of the emphasis on specific choice of language and phrasing in application essays. When original academic essays are flagged incorrectly, it's usually because there are only so many original ways to say "Sigmund Freud was the father of psychotherapy" and "World War Two started with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939." (If you want to test that proposition, just do a quick scan or Google search for those two phrases, both of which are totally original, because I just composed them off the top of my head and without any sourcing.)

By contrast, when students plagiarize application essays, what they tend to do is retain all of the exact language of someone else's essay, practically verbatim, while merely substituting their own information for that of the student info in the original essay. Unlike the two examples of false-flagged plagiarism above, when students copy/paste specific language from older application essays, there's really no mistaking that for coincidence.

FreelanceWriter is spot-on. Admissions staff do not want to waste their time with crappy, plagiarized essays. The prevention of those scenarios seems to be the clear primary purpose of this partnership. I'm actually surprised this happened already. I can hardly imagine how dreadful it must be to read tons of poorly written admissions essays. Even worse if they're plagiarized.