One in 20 essays submitted by applicants for medical residencies at a prestigious Harvard teaching hospital contained evidence of plagiarism, according to a study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine and described by The Boston Globe. The authors, a group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital led by Scott Segal and Brian Gelfand, studied nearly 5,000 personal statements submitted from 2005 to 2007 with applications to the five largest residency programs at the hospital.
About 14 percent of the applications from outside the United States and Canada contained plagiarized material, while around 2 percent of the applications submitted by U.S. citizens did. Copied sections included personal anecdotes about patients and family members. “I think that is the part that bothered me the most,” Dr. Segal told the Globe. “You read this heartfelt anecdote about a person’s illness or a family member’s illness or a particular patient, and it turns out not to be their experience at all.” The authors believe the problem extends beyond Harvard’s teaching hospitals because, in some specialties, up to 45 percent of applicants nationwide sent applications to Brigham.
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9 Responses to 5% of Applicants for Harvard Medical Residencies Cribbed Essays, Study Finds
davi2665 - July 20, 2010 at 9:17 am
I wonder if these “physicians” also make up their histories and physicals for patients they admit. Or maybe they just plagiarize an interpretation of a scan. A lack of integrity is a far more serious problem than a lack of medical knowledge; the latter can be remedied, the former cannot.
dank48 - July 20, 2010 at 11:01 am
They’re just practicing (ahem) for the real thing. After they get their M.D., they can let the drug companies write their studies.
mrsdillie - July 20, 2010 at 12:15 pm
In some cultures, not that this should be excused, “borrowing” a narrative isn’t as big a sin as it is in Western society. And since their fees are often paid by the state, these students need to do anything to get into the program. Didn’t CalTech stop taking Chinese grad students because the cheating ratio was so high?
goxewu - July 20, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Re #3:What, pray tell, does the fact that “in some cultures” this or that “isn’t as big a sin as it is in Western society”? In some cultures, they practice honor killings, eating fricassee’d dog, chopping off the hands of thieves, polygamy and polyandry, bribery as a normal course of business deals, FGM, and a bunch of other things. Is that relevant to Western society generally frowning on those things?And the “not that this should be excused” is disingenous, unless it’s just a middle-school cultural geography lesson thrown in for free.
11314967 - July 20, 2010 at 2:06 pm
I run an application servie for postdoctoral studies in a health profession. It is appalling that applicants feel justified in taking shortcuts that undermine all that they have worked for. When I worked in medical school admissions years ago, we on the staff would jokingly admonish one another not to get sick–”these people might work on you.”
babyboomer46 - July 20, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Sadly, the results from the most recent studies of academic dishonesty in US undergraduate education leads me to predict more cheating in medical and other professional schools in the next years. (Up to 80% of student body cheats at least once in their four years in schools without an honor code and around 33% in schools with strong honor systems)
mxb22 - July 20, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Come on, look at the numbers. Only 2% of American applicants supposedly plagiarized. That’s unfortunate, but that’s a drop in the bucket. The more worrisome figure is the percentage of foreign medical graduates who plagiarized, but that’s still a small percentage. Plagiarism, cheating, corruption–call it what you will, it’s an endemic, if understandable, problem in developing countries. It’s the normal way of doing business in some places. I spoke to a US Embassy official (in a country I won’t name) who told me they needed to tell native students not to include money in their applications to US universities. Students just figured they would need to bribe their way in. In any case, if the cynical commentators here don’t trust American physicians, then the next time they’re sick, let them call a professor.
rhett - July 21, 2010 at 10:39 pm
At Harvard College plagiarism means the student is expunged: He vanishes; his record vanishes.
22286593 - August 2, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Higher education should simply get rid of statements for admissions–the system creates powerful incentives to lie and embellish. Nearly all law school applicants aspire to public service and social justice, yet vast majority of them will seek positions in private firms. We can save ourselves a lot of time and anxiety by replacing the statement with more demonstrable evidence of well-roundedness or social disadvantage.