Ever wonder if college admissions teams ever read those essays you submit with your application? (Especially after the Adam Wheeler case broke big?) Worry not: Penn State, and at least 30 Penn State applicants, will assure you that they do.

Inside Higher Ed reports that, after a recent influx of plagiarized admissions essays, Penn State University has decided to take a more aggressive approach against plagiarism.

As Inside Higher Ed notes, Penn State officials realized that they had a plagiarism problem on their hands after assigning applicants to write an essay about the university’s concept of principled leadership.

Instead of writing an original piece, a number of applicants—30, to be exact—simply searched for the phrase “principled leadership” and copied what they found. Unbelievably, they all plagiarized from the same essay.

The rather large number of plagiarizers prompted Penn State admissions officials to take action by employing the software Turnitin. Turnitin is software aimed specifically for detecting plagiarism at the college level, and the company recently introduced a new service that specifically searches in admissions essays. Though several university and college admissions offices have signed up for the service, Penn State is the only institution to publicly announce that they use it.

Our Take:

If there are any colleges or universities out there who aren’t currently using Turnitin, then I hope this incident causes them to take advantage of the service. The only part I would add is that those institutions who reject students based on their plagiarized essays should state their reason for doing so in their rejection letter.

I had classmates in high school who knowingly plagiarized on important term papers. Although the teachers threatened that they would be disciplined, the offenders were only required to rewrite their papers. Yeah, some discipline.

As a result, they got cocky and felt they had really gotten away with something. I have a feeling that the people plagiarizing on an admissions or any other college-level essay are the ones who simply got away with it in high school. By telling the applicant that they have been rejected because of their plagiarism, rather than glossing over it, the institutions will be calling out the applicants on their behavior and letting them know that they, in fact, didn’t get away with it.

Read more about Penn State’s decision here.