Laskaris declined to speculate on what actions the College would take if the Common Application were to adopt Turnitin, but said the Common Application "does a great job of surveying the member institutions before making major policy decisions."
Laskaris said she would be concerned about the Common Application's adoption of Turnitin because she prefers the Admissions Office to believe "in the honesty and integrity of the students and the process."
"It presumes that everybody's dishonest from the get-go," Laskaris said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "I don't approach our application review process thinking that everyone's dishonest and I don't want us as a staff to approach the process that way. I would like our process to be one that is positive and affirming and we're looking for students who are exceptional, students we would like to admit, rather than presuming that all of our applicants have submitted a plagiarized essay."
Turnitin produces a report for each application submitted to its service, which provides a similarity score as well as a side-by-side display of the matching text and the source that the text matches, according to Jeff Lorton, product and business development manager of Turnitin.
Lorton said while admissions offices verify transcripts and test scores, they have been unable to verify the originality of students' written submissions in an efficient manner.
"We honestly built this at the request of admissions offices," he said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "They really do care about what they do and they've wanted a way to verify this one piece that they've not been able to verify in the past."
While some admissions officers have expressed the concern that reviewing the service's reports would be time consuming, a report released by Turnitin studied Pennsylvania State University as it implemented the service for its MBA program and found that the admissions officers believe the service saved time, according to Lorton.
The case study demonstrated that the time spent in plagiarism review, analysis, decision-making and communication was reduced from 150 to 12 hours by using the service, according to a press release from Turnitin.
Laskaris said plagiarism has been a problem for the College's admissions process in the past.
"This did unfortunately happen a few years ago and the student's offer of admission was rescinded and they were separated from the College, so they lost all of the credits they earned," she said.
Dartmouth's policy regarding plagiarism in the admissions process differs from its policy regarding plagiarism in the classroom, which generally results in three terms of suspension, Laskaris said.
Laskaris said the difference in policy is due to the severity of plagiarizing admissions material.
"Very clearly in our admissions material, we state right up front that we reserve the right to rescind an offer of admission for any falsification of the admissions process," Laskaris said. "The bedrock of this community is academic integrity and personal integrity and for someone to have falsified information coming into this process we think is a very serious matter."
When the Admissions Office detects "a small number" of instances of plagiarism, the College's policy depends on the circumstances, Laskaris said.
With a weak applicant, the Admissions Office "would not take any further steps," but with a student that the office especially wanted to admit, they might contact the student or the student's counselor, "depending on the concern," Laskaris said.
If students submit identical essays to multiple schools, they will not be presented as matches through the service, Lorton said.
"One of the things that we've built into [Turnitin] that is different from our other services is being able to look for information that will allow us to not present what some would call self-plagiarism,'" Lorton said. "Before the results are presented, we do look for that information to see if this is the same applicant and if it's the same applicant to three different universities and we find a match to that same person's document, we don't present it as a match."
Admissions officers who use the service will not be able to determine the other schools to which a student has applied by searching for that student's plagiarism results, according to Lorton.
The service costs approximately $1 per submission, with a minimum license of $2,000 per year and volume discounts available for schools with many applications, Lorton said.
Lorton said Turnitin decided to expand to admissions after receiving extensive feedback regarding the necessity of this service in admissions.
"There could be that match and we don't tell you if that's plagiarism or not plagiarism," Lorton said. "What we tell you is that we found a match in that document and an admissions person who would open that similarity report and look at it would know in probably a few seconds whether there was a problem with that."
While several students interviewed by The Dartmouth said they did not have any problems with the use of the Turnitin software, other students expressed concerns.
Ahmad Nazeri '11 said he does not think the benefits of the service are worth its cost.
"I feel like it's a waste of resources to put 20,000 applications through a system and spend thousands of dollars on the process and a lot of energy and time," Nazeri said.
Chris Magoon '13 said when his high school used Turnitin, many of the returned results seemed to inaccurately reflect the essay's authenticity.
"The thing I remember is most essays would come back like 40 percent plagiarized because it would pick up little bits, but the teachers obviously understood that it was just picking up fragments," Magoon said. "I wouldn't have a problem with it as long as the person who is looking at it understands how it works."
