Sixty-three MBA applicants at Penn State and UCLA have been rejected after admissions officials discovered they had plagiarized parts of their admissions essays, a number that the schools say is likely to increase in subsequent application rounds.
The plagiarized essays—48 at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business and 15 at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management—were discovered using Turnitin for Admissions, a service that runs essays through a database of published and unpublished content and flags similarities. About 50 “potential” cases of plagiarism have been flagged at Northeastern’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, but no applicants have been rejected, and the school is continuing to investigate them. Wake Forest Schools of Business said it has not discovered plagiarism incidents.
