News from the world of academic integrity

The school year is getting underway in the Northern Hemisphere, so there have been a number of links twittered or linked to in the past week that need linking:

• Radio Free Europe published an article by Alan Crosby: Montenegro Education Council Members Resign, Learn Lesson About Plagiarism. It seems their curriculum was plagiarized from the Croation one without reference. 
• In Australia the Daily Telegraph authors Chris Harris & Bruce McDougall report on a primary school teacher caught offering contract cheating: Cheating students on marketplace website offering to buy or sell work. It may seem that the practice of contract cheating is rather widespread in Australia, but I believe that is because there are researchers actively looking there. I did a quick search on eBay and found lots of offers and people looking for help in Berlin...
• Linked from another article I was reading was an article by Daniel Etchells from The Sport Digest from 2016 about South Korea: Moon Dae-sung Suspended as IOC Member Over Plagiarism. It seems that Moon, who had won an Olympic gold medal in Athens (2004) in taekwondo, had been awarded a doctorate in 2007 with a thesis on taekwondo. In 2014 Kookmin University rescinded his doctorate. Moon defended himself in the appeal, stating that he had the permission (!) of the author of the text he used to use it. 
• The Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan reported in June 2017 that there has been a record number of university students sanctioned for academic misconduct in 2016. There were a total of 33 universities questioned by the news agency TT, they reported 733 sanctions (an average of 2.5 per 1000 full-time equivalent students). In 2013 there were only 533 sanctions meted out. The increase in serious cases registered and sanctioned may be due to teachers doing more checking or getting better at discovering students who cheat on exams or plagiarize.

Montenegrin minister caught plagiarizing, another German minister steps down

Retraction Watch reports today that the Montenegrin daily newspaper Vijesti has reported that the science minister of the former Yugoslavian state, Sanja Vlahovic, has been caught plagiarizing. And a paper that supported her "election" as professor at the private Mediterranean University that she supposedly published in the Emerald Publishing Group's International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management can't be found. I couldn't find the paper, entitled "Destinations Competitiveness in Modern Tourism", in this journal either. There are calls for her to step down, as science ministers should not be plagiarizing.

The German Spiegel Online today reports that the state minister of education, Waltraud Wende, has stepped down over a long, drawn out spat about an accusation of bribery against her. While she was president of the University of Flensburg, she is accused of having offered to support the chancellor of that university for re-election if he promised her a chair at the university for her to return to when her term of office is up. She had been a professor in Groningen (Netherlands) when elected president of the university, so she had no own chair in Flensburg. There were searches of her private home and the university conducted by the police in this matter.