According to silicon.com University admissions body Ucas ran a trial of a CopyCatch software on 50,000 university applications last year because of rising numbers of students bootlegging material for the personal statement section of the form. Around five per cent - 2,500 - of applications were found to have used material from web sources such as Google, ranging from a couple of sentences to the entire personal statement.
The technology will now be used on all the half-a-million university applications Ucas receives this year for students looking to start their courses in September 2008. The organisation has also sent letters to schools warning about the new plagiarism detection tactics.
An interesting comment in The Guardian recently (30 oct 2007) on the impracticability of general automatic copyright policing, by Cory Doctorow:
Sure the rights robocop is not the purpose built gadget named in the post that is supposed to catch students who embellish their personal statement such as “I am highly motivated to study international politics because I never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people” (an obvious Bushism mashup, and I’m not claiming that any British student would have written that).