Plagiarism- South Korea’s Dirty Little Secret
With a seemingly never-ending raft of plagiarism accusations running rife in the South Korean media, has the problem reached epidemic proportions, and how does the behaviour of those at the top ‘trickle down’ to influence the rest of us?
Background
Even a semi-casual observer of South Korea over the last few months will not have managed to avoid stories of plagiarism levelled at the first lady, Kim Keon-Hee.
She has been accused of plagiarising her doctoral thesis at the otherwise highly-regarded Kookmin University. Essentially, it is believed that she amalgamated existing research into what would eventually become her dissertation.
According to KBS World, “a group representing 14 organizations claimed that their analysis of Kim’s thesis concluded that it is an aggregation of plagiarism in terms of its content, specific sentences and concept.”
The article goes on to state that “Kim took parts of a thesis written by Gu Yeon-sang, a general education professor at Sookmyung Women’s University, and copied postings and articles from privately-run blogs without citation.”
In most countries, allegations such as these would be taken extremely seriously and potentially result in fallout for the first lady and her husband. Indeed, there has been significant huffing and puffing in the South Korean media over the scandal. However, with this incident amounting to just the latest in a long line of plagiarism scandals to rock the ROK, it has been hard to take the criticism levelled by society at Kim seriously.
Seoul National University, unquestionably the most prestigious institution of learning in the country, has also found itself mired in scandal, after two papers it published on AI were found to have been copied from earlier Hong Kong and Chinese research.
According to KEDglobal.com, “the paper appeared to copy and paste a 26-word sentence from SenseTime’s (the Hong Kong/Chinese research) 2019 publication, ‘Knowledge distillation via route constrained optimization.’”
Is this a new phenomenon sweeping the country then? The answer to that is, in fact, a firm no. A simple Google search turns up several high-profile cases of high-level academics framing others’ work as their own.
A scandal rocked the country in 2015, when, according to time.com, “200 professors from several of the country’s universities were indicted for alleged copyright violations after they republished books by other authors under their own names.” As we can see, this is a story as old as the hills.
Reasons
So why does it keep happening? Well, one obvious reason is that those at the very top of society, such as politicians, their spouses, eminent professors and the like seem to indulge in the practice with alarming frequency. What kind of message does this send to the rest of us? A fish rots from the head down as the old saying goes.
Another reason is that copying and claiming others’ work as your own does not get stamped out at elementary school level when it starts. In my experience of teaching young learners here in Korea, (see more of my articles on this) I have noticed them all copying from one or two answer sheets at the beginning of class before submitting homework and have heard, anecdotally, of teachers providing students with answers to tests or simply giving all students in the class an automatic passing grade in the fear that parents will complain if their child fails.
In a country where it is imperative not to stand out from your peers in any way, ensuring parity through cheating is one way to ensure this. There is also undoubtedly something in the immense competition heaped on students in Korea to succeed- if a chance at success is given, a way to get ahead of your peers, then why not take it, even if the consequences might be negative later on down the line?
Final Thoughts
Of course, these are only my observations from living in South Korea and naturally, plagiarism, corruption and cheating happen everywhere. Still, the rate at which these sorts of stories appear in the press in Korea is alarming. My takeaway is that if those at the very top can be brought into line, the rest of us will eventually follow. It’s monkey see, monkey do after all.
