Plagiarism application essays

[EndlessEntropy]

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I may be neurotic, but do schools check for plagiarism with previous years application personal statements and secondaries? The reason I'm asking is with the hundreds of thousands of essays from over the years, I'm worried about incidental phrase similarity. My essays were written by me of course, but I feel like there will be some similarity in phrases and wording given the sample size and similar themes.

 

[jd989898]

If you wrote your essays, there's no reason they would have any significantly higher level of incidental phrase similarity than any other originally written essay.

 

[bananafish94]

If you wrote the essays yourself, there's no reason you should worry about something like this.

 

[Lucca]

Have you ever heard of Borges' "The Library"? Plagiarism detection software is a little more sophisticated than just flagging anything that user similar phrasing to something else.

That being said, you should follow Safire's advice when writing: "Avoid stock expressions like the plague".

 

[LizzyM]

OMG, if you like science, want to help people and have a grandparent who has died, you have already hit 60% on the scale. 😉 Seriously, I've never heard of anyone using plagiarism software to check personal statements.