Question on Plagiarism before I post

I know so many people have already done so. But I still want to double check before posting anything. Is is safe to post our essays up here? Like, is there anything to prevent plagiarism, and will it reflect badly on us if admissions people look up turnitin.com or something and find that we've posted our essays up here?

Yes it is safe. It's perfectly fine to look for advice on essays, schools encourage it.

As far as safety and protection goes, your REAL NAME should be at the bottom corner, Catherine Zhu. So if anyone takes your essay, you will always have your real name at the bottom.

lol, I'd love to see the idiot who tries to steal one of these essays! Your email and name are attached to your account, so you'll always have proof you posted it.

lol thank you!

In addition, below every message you post there is your name automatically appended to the message. There's no better way to "prove" who was the author of the message (assuming, of course, the message wasn't copied from somewhere else).

EssayForum.com

Jul 27, 09, 05:10pm - Attached on merging:
Quick question on posting Undergraduate Admission Essays

Quick question on posting Undergraduate Admission Essays

Im curious, how can I be sure that after posting my essay it will not be stolen and copied, therefore losing credibility with the University, by having the same essay as someone else? (if anyone was dumb enough to try that) It would be a huge hassle to work around wouldnt it?

See number 11 in Forum FAQs at http://www.essayforum.com/essay-faq/

In brief, you should make sure that you provided your real first and last name when registered for this site. This will assist Forum administrators in helping to prove your authorship should such a question arise. Next, you may elect to place your name, your initials, or some other identifying information at the beginning or end of the post in which you place your essay. This, along with the time/date stamping of the post, will verify that you placed the essay here before anybody else used it for some other purpose.

As you say, the likelihood of such nefarious (and stupid) activity is low. But you can use those steps to protect yourself.

This is less of an issue with regular essays than it is with application essays. With regular essays, you can also protect yourself by asking your professor / teacher if it is acceptable to use the website. That way, even if your essay gets flagged by anti-plagiarism software, you know you won't get in trouble (as long as the essay being on this site was the only reason for the flag, of course). For application essays, I suppose you are a bit more reliant on people not being totally stupid.