Saturday, April 7, 2012

plagiarism leads to hungarian president's fall

Plagiarism is becoming serious problem in Sri Lanka as well. With the increasing accessibility to the web, it has becoming an 'entrenched practice' especially due to the ease with which you can 'rob' information using the web.

Fortunately, it is very easy to detect the 'web lifted' information using the same web. Unfortunately what we still do not have is a robust set of academic rules and regulations which could be mitigated effectively and quickly in the event of proven  plagiarism, even though the academia in Sri Lanka has long recognized the illegality and the seriousness of  plagiarizing others work. The other problem the academia facing today is the shear volume of  plagiarism.

Here is what has happened to the president of Hungary. Apperently the the fellow has lifted a cool 95% of his doctoral thesis from others. A true politician.

"The Pál Schmitt academic misconduct controversy refers to the allegations of plagiarism concerning the 1992 doctoral dissertation and the circumstances of the doctoral defence of Pál Schmitt, the president of Hungary. The controversy began in January 2012, when Hungarian news organizations published a number of articles claiming that about 197 pages of Schmitt's 215-page dissertation had been lifted from works by other, foreign scholars, without giving appropriate credit.

On 11 January 2012, Hungarian news portal HVG.hu published an article which claims that material that amounts to around 180 of the 215 pages of Pál Schmitt's 1992 doctoral (dr. univ.) dissertation, titled "Az újkori olimpiai játékok programjának elemzése" ("An analysis of the programme of the modern Olympics"), had been lifted from a 1987 manuscript by Bulgarian sports reseacher Nikolay Georgiev, together with a page's worth of material from a work by Hristo Meranzov and Georgiev. On 19 January, news organizations found that an additional 17 pages had been lifted from a paper German sport sociologist Klaus Heinemann. The late Georgiev's daughter said she did not know of any cooperation between Schmitt and her father in the preparation of Georgiev's work. Heinemann denied any knowledge of Schmitt, and expressed concern about the allegation of plagiarism.

Further concerns about a conflict of interest were raised when it was reported that multiple members of Schmitt's thesis committee had also been members of the Hungarian Olympic Academy and the Hungarian Olympic Committee, organizations Schmitt headed around the time the dissertation was defended."



Link to Wikipedia article "Pál Schmitt scientific misconduct controversy"

1 comment:

  1. What saddens me is that it took twenty years to find out that his dissertation was plagiarized. It says a lot about the sad state of academia in Hungary...But then again, that was twenty years ago, my university now uses computer software to check if the material used by students is plagiarized. It's probably not 100% accurate, but it's a start.

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