If there is one word that gets most communities the world over all stirred up, it is ‘plagiarism’. Be it artistes, musicians, writers, politicians or even academicians, they all rue the p-word. And in the space of higher education, including MBA, plagiarism is nothing short of blasphemy.

B-schools that use the essay+recommendations route for admissions have a problem with applicants using copied material in their essays and are using software services such as Turnitin for Admissions to discover such plagiarism.

This year, the Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business detected 30 cases of plagiarism out of some 400 applications. When 18 of these cases were detected earlier in the year, 10 of them happened to be Indians.

Plagiarism in business education is not a recent menace. In 2007, 34 students who were found copying at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business were either suspended or expelled. It is no coincidence that Smeal College has recently inserted the following instruction on its international applicant requirements webpage (as of July 26, 2010) — “Please ensure … adheres to principles of ethics in the admission process including guidelines regarding academic integrity. To ensure academic integrity, all essays will be confirmed through ‘Turnitin for Admissions’ authenticity software.”

That Smeal considers the plagiarism problem to be an international one is clear from the