Why, oh why, would you plagiarise your personal statement? According to The Times, five percent of people do. And most of them, unsurprisingly, get caught.
People plagiarise essays, and in it’s own way that’s understandable. Desperation, that last minute realisation that you’ve been too paraletic for the last, not really knowing what the hell you’re writing about, so up comes the website, cut-copy-paste and you’re done. You’ll probably get caught and fail anyway, but the initial feeling that made an essentially intelligent person act like that is understandable.
With personal statements, it seems not quite as easy to rationalise. If you honestly can’t write a short biography of yourself, then maybe a brief rethink about whether university education is really the way forward would help. I mean come on, a little bit about you, what exactly it is that made you want to do surf studies, or golf course management, whatever. How hard can it be?
However, the fact that people are acting with a level of astuteness that underwhelms their A-level results is reflective of some bright spark’s desperation at trying to find a way around that devil in the detail of university applications: the personal statement. The truth underlying this is that personal statements just aren’t a reasonable way to select university applicants.
These students who were foolish, desperate or drunk enough to plagiarise their personal statements are one thing. They get caught. The brighter spark’s however, get help in a more individualistic and inventive fashion. They ask their teachers, copy their friends or get the assistance of their colleagues to write their personal statements.
So where’s the foul in that? Well to start with, it means that the students selecting places are those with access to the best support, and not the brightest. It doesn’t matter how bright you are if you wrote your personal statement with no help then you’re just simply never going to be as strong as a candidate who has had it checked, proofread and revamped by an academic professional who does this sort of thing year in , year out.
Now this leads, in all likelihood, to a bias towards private schools and those fortunate enough to have a grammar school education or good comprehensive schools. It doesn’t seem at all fair that those whose friends are not going to university or who are not fortunate enough to get this support should find themselves disadvantaged.
On top of all of this you have the issue of competences with regards to the course. Why, precisely, should a physics Masters applicant be a particularly persuasive writer? Finding it difficult to place your enthusiasm in words that ring true doesn’t mean you’re not enthusiastic about the subject that you’re applying for.
It also works the other way around; why should you be gifted a place on a maths course because you happen to be a more talented writer than you’re competitors. The competency being measured doesn’t correspond to anything that actually matters for the task you are applying for.
I wasn’t desperately taken by the history BA course I came here to study and changed after my first year, but my personal statement was obviously good enough. Why my academic future should rest on my creative writing skills is quite beyond me, unless of course I were applying for a creative writing course.
Undoubtedly the response will be that they need some way to differentiate between candidates, but the personal statement is just not the way forward. Individual module scores, interviews, extra entrance exams; any of these could be used, and all have disadvantages too. Ultimately however, the personal statement is causing supposedly bright and promising young students to panic and cheat.
It’s about time academics, admissions tutors and VCs opened their eyes to the fact that personal statements are a joke. There may not be a perfect system to institute in place of the personal statement, but there must be one that is fairer and more equal than this.
