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Personal statement similar to something the student has published elsewhere?


Dmmetler
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DD was asked to write up her experience with the a WCH for Athena’s, and instead wrote directly to other kids that might find themselves on a similar path, including why she had started her various projects, the frustrations of being a young kid who was beyond the materials available, but not really able to fit in to the adult world, either, and how she was trying to change that now by going to the adults and sharing that information-not to help her, but to help those who came later. 
 

And, honestly, it is better than any attempts that she has done on a personal essay-because she sounds like her, and it comes through as real, authentic, and true, while her efforts have come out stilted and stressed. It’s the difference between her projects sounding like something done to build a resume and her projects being something that grew out of her needs that turned into finding a totally new group to advocate for. If she turned this into more an essay form, it would easily be the best 
 

But, if she submits a revision of this statement, and it comes up matching her article for the Athena’s website pretty closely, what’s the chances that a reviewer will realize it’s the same kid? She will definitely have teaching at Athena’s, the conference, etc on her application. 

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48 minutes ago, dmmetler said:

But, if she submits a revision of this statement, and it comes up matching her article for the Athena’s website pretty closely, what’s the chances that a reviewer will realize it’s the same kid?

I think it will be pretty obvious that it's the same kid.  Is she not given credit for it?  That said, I don't know what they would think of her recycling an essay she wrote for something else.  Is there any chance that the original could be taken off of the Athena site?

Edited by EKS
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Honestly, she’s not even thinking of it as a college essay at this point. It’s something she wrote because Kirsten asked her to do so. But it is also just plain a really, really good explanation of the path she’s taken and why. 

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Personally, I think it would make perfect sense for a personal essay to have repeated themes. If that is her story and she is telling authentically I don't see any problem with recycling and it wouldn't occur to me that it is a negative. It would be positive to me that the statement was so authentic that she had the basis of it written and published before she was trying to impress any kind of committee. 

Edited by teachermom2834
ETA: I forgot my standard disclaimer that I have no experience with super competitive schools or scholarships.
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I think it would obvious that this is her, and it makes perfect sense to be speaking about one's experiences in very similar form in two different mediums.

Also, honestly, I highly doubt any college application reader is going to check whether her essay appears elsewhere online. They won't pay this much attention to it. Call me cynical, but they hve very limited time to spend on an application.

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I agree that adcoms are busy and don't spend a lot of time on any single application.  I'm also paranoid:

"A quick and simple method that essay evaluators and professors use to detect plagiarism is to enclose a sentence or a paragraph from the applicant’s essay in quotes and Google it. The search results will show exact matches to earlier works in which the sentence or paragraph was used."

I wonder if an adcom will do this, and not bother to see that it's the same person and plagiarized.  

I agree it's probably unlikely, but if it were my kid I would be seriously worried.  Because I'm a worrier.  

 

 

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I do think that considering the way some places do things, that it's possible that a computer algorithm will find it and that it will automatically reject it as plagiarism without any people having a chance to see that it's not. I used one of those programs once and all the quotes that the student had properly cited still made the essay end up being flagged as partially plagiarized. If I, as a sensible human, hadn't looked to see what was plagiarized, then I might have thought the paper actually had an issue. I don't know that anyone will bother to check. A note as suggested might help, but it might not.

On the other hand, I don't think I'd overly freak out about it.

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My biggest concern is something like "TurnItIn" matching and rejecting even before a human sees it, since a human would probably catch that it is the same name and details match, but a computer wouldn't. At the same time, that would probably rule out schools that really weren't as "holistic" as they claimed!

 

 

 

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My 9th grader has been an admission ambassador/volunteer at his nationally ranked ivy league feeder school. The things that he learned sitting in admission committee meetings is startling. Frankly, I would not chance it.  Even at the the middle school level, his highly selective school uses computer programs to check for plagiarism. If flagged, nobody is ever going to read the application.

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1 hour ago, gstharr said:

My 9th grader has been an admission ambassador/volunteer at his nationally ranked ivy league feeder school. The things that he learned sitting in admission committee meetings is startling. Frankly, I would not chance it.  Even at the the middle school level, his highly selective school uses computer programs to check for plagiarism. If flagged, nobody is ever going to read the application.

Ooh, please share details of what happens in adcom meetings, especially those things that might surprise us.

I agree with your second sentence.  We can all agree that adcoms don't spend a lot of time evaluating each individual application.  Does that mean they won't bother to check for plagiarism, or does that mean they won't bother to check a plagiarism flag isn't actually plagiarism?  I'd err on the side of caution.  

What does your dd get in return to writing this essay and having it publicly posted online?  It sounds like Athena's stands to benefit more than your daughter from this work.  

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10 hours ago, daijobu said:

Ooh, please share details of what happens in adcom meetings, especially those things that might surprise us.

I agree with your second sentence.  We can all agree that adcoms don't spend a lot of time evaluating each individual application.  Does that mean they won't bother to check for plagiarism, or does that mean they won't bother to check a plagiarism flag isn't actually plagiarism?  I'd err on the side of caution.  

What does your dd get in return to writing this essay and having it publicly posted online?  It sounds like Athena's stands to benefit more than your daughter from this work.  

If they use turnitin, it flags some paragraphs as being similar to other stuff found. On some topics there will be some overlap (my ds wrote an essay on Milton and it’s not like that guy has not been written about) so half a paragraph or sentence  said “Georgetown” something or other on the side. But if it’s a low percentage it’s not flagged. When entire chunks say that, well it would be a major flag. 

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At the same time, though, a lot of kids write their stuff at school, and if the school uses TurnItIn, that essay will already be in their database. My DD has been told by college profs not to submit drafts online and revise, submit drafts via e-mail or on paper for that reason, because the computer will kick out later revisions. And I know the college class my BK took basically used writing essays that could be used for scholarships, etc as the primary focus-she had to find and research scholarships she would qualify for and programs she might want to do (internships, transfer applications, Disney College Program, etc) and write those essays-so if it is common to use software and not check to see if it is the same person, every kid who takes that class is probably lowering their chances of getting in the programs they want. 

 

Realistically, a lot of the things that I can see many of the kids writing about are likely to be things they already wrote about, at minimum for a school essay. Add the fact that school newspapers are often on school websites, that sometimes kids are encouraged to submit Op. Eds, write-ups of projects for non-profits, and even quotes in news articles and interviews, it seems like this is something that kids applying to competitive programs (or even just Common App schools) are likely to hit. 

 

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