Avoiding Plagiarism: Write Personal Statement With Guidance From CUKAS Similarity Detection Service
The Conservatoires UK Admissions Service or CUKAS runs a clearing house for undergraduate and postgraduate music courses from seven of nine British conservatoires. If a student wishes to pursue a music degree at CUKAS member institutions, he or she will need to submit an application to CUKAS. Like the UCAS, CUKAS also allows its student applicants to submit one general online application for all its member conservatoires that the student wishes to apply in rather than submitting a separate application for each institution. CUKAS also makes use of a similarity detection process for detecting plagiarism in personal statements. Plagiarism detection is an important part of the student application process as it has been observed in the past that student applicants have a propensity to copy the work or a portion thereof of other students when submitting their own personal statement.
Students who write personal statements for CUKAS member conservatoires would do well to review their similarity detection service to ensure that when they write personal statement, they will not encounter a plagiarism problem with their application. CUKAS uses Copycatch, which finds statements in a document that show similarity, finds how much of the statement could have been copied, and present a report of the findings. When students write personal statement, after it is submitted to CUKAS it undergoes the following similarity detection procedure:
* Being checked against other personal statements that other applicants have previously submitted
* Being compared with sample personal statements collected from various websites
* Being compared with other possible sources such as paper publications
Copycatch does not take into consideration words that applicants commonly use in their personal statements such as ‘and’, ‘so’, ‘Duke of Edinburgh’, ‘football’ and ‘with’. However, if you have submitted earlier applications for previous cycles or schemes, CUKAS will not compare your current personal statement to previous ones you have submitted. Any personal statement showing a level of similarity of at least 10% are manually reviewed by the CUKAS Similarity Detection Service Team. This team will notify both the applicant and conservatoire if an application is confirmed to be plagiarised. The notification sent to the applicant includes instructions for viewing what Copycatch found, as well as a link to frequently asked questions that you can use a reference for further advice and guidance.
The CUKAS similarity detection service will help admissions staff at CUKAS member conservatoires evaluate the merits of an application. The conservatoire concerned will decide on how the similarity report will affect the student’s application. It is also up to them to decide what action to take regarding your application. The similarity report sent to a conservatoire will show the personal statement marked according to the marking system followed by CUKAS to identify plagiarised sentences and their sources as what the Copycatch system was able to identify.
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