This is something: A study published in the July 20, 2010 Annals of Internal Medicine finds that 5% of residency applications contain plagiarized content. The study from Boston’s Brigham & Woman’s Hospital is based on the personal statements of nearly 5,000 residency applicants that were matched against a database of published content.
The authors comment that the study is limited, among other things, by the fact that it was done in just one institution. It makes me wonder if the number is artificially high or potentially too low.
So why would medical students lie?
It’s the era of digital reverberation. Perhaps we’re seeing the digital youth coming of age. Take unbridled access to the worldwide database of human content and couple that with the capacity to cut-and-past and you’ve got a recipe for reverberation. Just look at the blogosphere.
Ignorance is bliss. While a sorry excuse, perhaps they don’t know better. There’s the sad reality that subtle forms of plagiarism have become the standard for students beginning at the secondary level. It’s conceivable that there’s a growing population that doesn’t see this type of ‘borrowing’ as a problem.
Competition. Throw in a little competition (on top of shifting norms and ignorance) and the temptation is greater. The study found that plagiarized content was more common non-U.S. trained applicants where the demands for a sharp application are all the higher. The Brigham, incidentally, is a Harvard institution.
And maybe this is nothing new. Perhaps this kind of behavior has been in play since the dawn of medical residency. Technology may now have allowed the exposure of a problem not unique to this generation of doctors.
I don’t have the answer to this one except that education regarding what constitutes unethical academic conduct has to begin early in the educational process. As the father of an 11-year-old who has already begun accessing the web for projects, I can see cut-and-paste easily evolving as a way of life for the next generation.
So if you’re a medical school or residency applicant keep in mind that big brother is watching and his ability to identify academic fraud will only get better. And if you have ideas that aren’t original, you best keep ‘em to yourself.
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We’re always going to play catchup countering unethical behavior.
However, we are seeing more and more universities implementing “high-tech” tools in their processes for discovering plagiarized content.
For example how University of Phoenix is using http://turnitin.com for their classes.
Perhaps (or hopefully) we will see these kinds of tools used more broadly in different industries including hiring processes.
Thanks, Audun. Cool on U Phoenix. I think the technology will just get better at identifying this kind of nonsense. The technology, I dare say, will set us free.
Most schools are using Turnitin or one of the other options. My MBA program at the University of Minnesota used it (the faculty were required to use it).
My cousin TAs at a large state school where she’s pursuing her PhD. She had one come back 100% plagarized – the student had handed it in to another professor the previous semester.
Only 5%? I have to wonder how thorough the sampling of published paper texts was. My guess is the numbers are much higher. Did they sample against books on personal statements for law school applications, for example? I hate to sound so cynical, but I used to find at least a five percent rate of plagiarized submissions just among freshman and sophomore English assignments at UT, even after I warned them I would be checking papers against Internet sources. Considering how much more important a residency application is and how much smarter the med students consider themselves than the average college student, I’d expect closer to a twenty percent rate of plagiarism, both in repurposing of working formats/outlines and in out and out theft of brilliant figures of speech.
I’m not sure how you’d find out, but I wonder how many of those applications were even written by the applicants themselves.
I would strongly dispute the first two points. While I can’t speak for students that come out of foreign institutions (not because I think they’re any worse about this – I just have no idea!), as a “digital youth” who came out of the American higher education system I can say for certain plagiarism is looked on as a big deal. People that do plagiarize don’t do this because they’re unaware of what they’re doing through digital reverberation or ethical ignorance but because, quite simply, they think that they can get away with it.
With simple websites like http://www.turnitin.com/ to check for plagiarism (which, frankly, everyone from my high school teachers to my college professors used), it’s really a shame that there is only one study from one residency program that is looking at plagiarism. However, I hope that this study will encourage Brigham & Women’s and other residency programs to incorporate a quick http://www.turnitin.com/ check into their regular application screening procedures.