Tag: plagiarism

The attacks against the Korean First Lady continue. She was cleared of plagiarizing her Phd dissertation. Now her Master’s thesis is being investigated for plagiarism:

Sookmyung Women’s University launched an inquiry last month into plagiarism allegations involving first lady Kim Keon Hee’s master’s degree thesis on art education, sources said Tuesday. 

Kim has been under allegations that she plagiarized the dissertation, which she submitted in 1999 to the university’s graduate school of education for her master’s degree.

Sookmyung began a probe into Kim’s case in mid-December, an alumni association of the university said, citing a letter sent from the school. The final result is expected to be out by around mid-March if relevant regulations requiring an outcome within 90 days upon such a probe’s launch are observed.

Yonhap

Kim has already been mocked & shamed publicly and she apologized for her prior resume padding actions. What is going on here is that this is likely retaliation for the investigations into Lee Jae-myung’s wife for when her husband was governor of Gyeongi province. What I would like to see is an investigation into the thesis and dissertations of all major political figures in Korea. How widespread is this problem?

At this point it is pretty clear that the first lady did rely on plagiarism for her Phd dissertation, but I don’t know what this group is hoping to accomplish that hasn’t already been done. She has already been mocked & shamed publicly and she apologized for her actions:

First lady Kim Keon-hee has come under fire again, as a group of professors has reignited the allegations that she plagiarized her Ph.D. dissertation and other published papers. She had been cleared of the allegations last month following an eight-month probe by her alma mater, Kookmin University, which stated ultimately that the “statute of limitations of five years for verifying the papers has expired.”

The group of 16 professors from 14 academic associations, called the Pan-academic National Verification Group for the Verification of Suspicions of Plagiarism of First Lady Kim Keon-hee, held a press conference to unveil their findings verifying Kim’s academic misconduct at the Press Center in Seoul, Tuesday. The group claimed that all of Kim’s academic works are “indisputably entangled with plagiarism,” and that they all violate basic academic standards. 

According to the group’s findings, a total of 220 out of the 860 sentences in Kim’s Ph.D. dissertation that she produced when she attended Kookmin University’s Graduate School of Techno Design in 2008 were copied and pasted without citing the original sources.

Korea Times

Here appears to be the real reason this group has been formed:

Meanwhile, the ruling People Power Party (PPP) questioned the credibility of the Pan-academic National Verification Group’s findings, claiming that the group supports the DPK and has political intentions.

“As the group’s name may suggest, the verification group pretends to make a scholastic presentation on behalf of the academic community … However, the bottom line is that it is merely a political organization that supports DPK leader Lee Jae-myung,” PPP spokesperson Rep. Park Jung-ha commented on the PPP’s website, Tuesday.

Park said that some of the 14 academic associations that are part of the organization had openly supported Lee during the presidential campaign earlier in March and called on them to “stop deceiving people under the pretext of academic investigation.”

You can read more at the link, but this appears to all just be in retaliation for the ongoing investigation into Lee Jae-myung’s wife.

This makes me wonder what the investigation would have determined if President Yoon had lost the election:

 A university on Monday cleared First Lady Kim Keon-hee of plagiarism after a monthslong probe into in her academic papers.

Kookmin University in Seoul conducted an investigation into Kim’s four research papers over allegations of misconduct raised last year. 

Kim earned her PhD in design at the university in 2008.

The university said its investigating committee concluded her doctoral dissertation and two other papers “constitute neither plagiarism nor research misconduct that seriously deviates from the range normally accepted in the academic disciplines.” 

As for the remaining paper, it was impossible to verify whether there had been misconduct, the school said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

What an embarrassment for the Park administration if they did in fact plagiarize the new national slogan.  Even if they did not plagiarize it they still should have been aware that a major country like France was already using the slogan:

The Park Geun-hye administration’s newly created national slogan celebrating Korean creativity was plagiarized from a French campaign, an opposition lawmaker and renowned designer said Wednesday.

Rep. Sohn Hye-won of the Minjoo Party of Korea said during the interim leadership meeting in the morning that the government’s “Creative Korea” slogan and its logo design plagiarized the “Creative France” campaign of Business France, a French national agency promoting international investment in the country.

“Using the word ‘creative’ in front of the name of the country in the slogan, and using the red and blue colors in the logo design, are blatant acts of plagiarism,” Sohn said. “It is especially embarrassing that the plagiarized slogan is celebrating creativity.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but it is pretty ironic that a slogan pushing creativity was possibly plagiarized.