system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Plagiarized application documents?

So I'm on a search committee for a tenure track faculty position at an SLAC, and I sat down to review applications today, and noticed a jarring change in style between the research statement and the diversity statement.  A little googling reveals the diversity statement is 100% plagiarized.

Now I'm paranoid, so I start checking all of them with plagiarism checking software.  I'm on application 3, and so far they're ALL plagiarized--teaching statements to research statements to diversity statements.  WTAF?  Is it really this common?  I started wondering why you would work so hard to get a PhD only to plagiarize your job apps, and then realized they probably just plagiarized their dissertations too.

Am I just experiencing a statistical phenomenon, or is academic fraud really this common?

UPDATE: have now checked 16 applications.  3/16 had at least 1 document with anywhere from 1-3 pages lifted verbatim from internet sources.  Very blatant plagiarism.  I double checked it all by hand.

UPDATE 2: To clarify for people who just cant quite believe this is real: by internet sources, I mean publicly available sample documents and documents posted on completely different professors' websites years ago, not internet sources belonging to the actual applicants.  I checked for all that.  And yes, someone really did copy/paste about a page of someone else's research statement.  It was a very broad and vague preamble to a research statement on a similar topic.
gpt
Be careful that you’re not detecting document recycling. If a previous reviewer did the same thing you did, the document would be in the database but the candidate would still be the original author. Of course, this may not apply in your situation, but it’s worth worrying about.