Friday, February 17, 2012

VroniPlag case 19

Case 19 has made its way to the front page of VroniPlag. This is the first dissertation submitted to a private university for finance, the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Interestingly, the accreditation body for the school, the Wissenschaftsrat, had strongly recommended accrediting the school but not giving them the right to have doctoral students. The Hessian state disregarded this and gave the school dissertation rights.

The university president responded to the notice of the documentation promptly and will be starting an investigation.

This thesis includes an extremely large bibliography, around 2200 entries on 170 pages. There are so many errors in the bibliography that a separate documentation page has been opened for this. In addition to many typographical errors, errors that the source made are also copied. There are also many instances of translation plagiarism to be found here.

2 comments:

  1. I know this does not fit very well here, but maybe it is worth a whole new blog entry ;) :

    There is a court case in Norway about a professor who stole text from one of his students' exam paper. More can be found here:
    http://www.uniforum.uio.no/nyheter/2012/02/masterstudent-fikk-medhold-beskylte-forsteamanuensis-for-plagiat-av-eksamensoppgave.html

    Made a headline in the university paper.
    A good translator can be found here:
    http://en.dicios.com/noen/
    ... but one gets the gist from just reading ...

    BTW: Was that 6 Feb talk at HTW recorded and can be watched somewhere online?

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  2. Wow, Gunnar, I'm beginning to love Norway more each day!
    There was a similar case, in Germany, but the student eventually refrained from filing a complaint. ("eine Krähe hackt..." you know) Well, this student was a huge luminary and a person with a great talent to make intelligent inventions. One fine day though, he found his whole concept almost literally in a science magazine publication - signed as the work by his professor, mentioning the student's name in the footnotes, having "given him very valuable assistance". Yeah, right. Assistance? Nope! It was clearly the student's invention and work---he also wrote a paper, though did not publish it to the whole world---but the professor followed his motto "Publish or perish!" and eventually declared the work his own. Common practice. (Regretfully)

    But the student kept quiet about it and did not even complain, because he feared possible actions that could harm his reputation. (up to utter slander)

    ReplyDelete

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