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.”
