This admission season, applicants to Smeal were required to submit three essays along with their application, the question for the second one of which was ‘How do you see Principled Leadership impacting the business world today? Give an example of a time when you demonstrated Principled Leadership in your career or community.’

As Smeal’s MBA Admissions Director Carrie Marcinkevage scanned the essays to select candidates for interviews, she felt having read certain paragraphs before in essays by earlier applicants. Upon further scrutiny and Googling, she found that they had all been copied exactly as they were from an article on ‘Principled’ Leadership’ from b-school accrediting body AACSB’s website, without citation of source and passed off as the applicants’ original work. In one case, the applicant had not even taken care to change the font of the plagiarised paragraph as copied from its original source.

‘Ironically the essay question is based on ‘Principled Leadership’. This not only negatively affects the applicants’ chances of getting into the school but also tarnishes the reputation of all the Indian applicants,’ Akshay Madane, an Admissions Graduate Assistant at Smeal

MBA students in India, even from highly reputed b-schools privately admit to rampant cheating in internal exams and projects as institutionalized culture, not participating in which can sometimes render a student as an outcast in the class.

This year, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore has replaced group discussions with essays in their admissions process. It is not known how seriously IIM Bangalore will take plagiarism in admission essays, or if they even have a process to check for a case of copying in the first place. It would however do shortlisted applicants good to learn some Copyrights 101 and the etiquette of citation, and not dig a possible grave to their admission chances with the shovel of plagiarism.