DPK submits bills mandating independent counsel to investigate first lady
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.”
This story, published in September 2022, raises further questions about the approach to plagiarism in South Korea, it is also another case relating to political figures. There may be ongoing debate about this specific case, but it is a useful example of how an individual’s reputation can be dashed if they have committed plagiarism.
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.
The plagiarized sentences include 40 sentences from a research paper by Gu Yeon-sang, a professor of general education at Sookmyung Women’s University, 24 sentences from newspaper articles and 146 sentences from “Happy Campus,” an online dissertation platform popular among university students here, where reports and essays are sold at a price of around 500 won ($0.36) each.
