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German Science Minister Faces Plagiarism Scandal

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-your-own-work dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, Annette Schavan, faces allegations that substantial parts of her PhD thesis have been copied without proper attribution. According to the Wordpress blog that brought up the accusations(German), 56 out of 325 pages of her thesis contain instances of plagiarism. Schavan is the same minister who called an earlier instance of plagiarism by the former German defense minister to be 'embarrassing.'"

4 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Well, lets keep fair for a while and look at facts by w4rl5ck · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. there has not yet been any scientific peer review of the claims. It's all unproven and should be treated as such

    2. the thesis was written in 1980. This is quite a different area regarding both scientific citation rules as well as the abililty to "copy+paste" in today's sense.

    Using ideas and deriving information from former work is not unusual, and from what I have read in analyses of the analyses, it's quite unclear how much of these so-called plagiarized pages will really be named as such by a university committee (that will most likely be instantiated).

    Also worth to mention that the thesis (for all 350 pages!) received an scl grade.

  2. It's plagiarism by fedt · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://schavanplag.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/plagiatsdokumentation_schavan_020512.pdf

    Starting at page 7 is where it gets good...and definitely not explainable. It reminds me of the elementary school "We have zero tolerance for plagiarism. It's easy not to plagiarize! Change some verb forms, add a few prepositions, and reposition clauses!"

  3. Holding PhD candidates to high standards ... by perpenso · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... but it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them ...

    Politicians? Isn't this really the case of holding a PhD candidate to a really high standard?

  4. Only asshats start a reply in the title by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Informative

    and continue into the body, BTW.

    you do realise that most posters, even if they're not naturalised english speakers are writing english, right?

    When you learn to capitalise correctly you can presume to tell me what I do or don't realise, OK?

    And your original claim didn't specify words from English, or even the Indo-European family. Indo-European, sometimes referred to as Indo-Germanic, is the parent of both Greek and Latin, among others.

    any word has at least some connection to a greek root. Though in several cases, that root has a (germanic, for example) root itself.

    You appear to contradict yourself. In any case, if having a Greek root and having "some connection" to one are the same thing then your great uncle's third cousin twice removed is identically equivalent to your great grandmother's next door neighbour.

    P.S. pig, dog.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."