Park Mee-seok

By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter

Suspicions have arisen that presidential secretary designate for social affairs Park Mee-seok, a former professor of Sookmyung University in Seoul, plagiarized her student's thesis for one of her past research papers.

In her paper, which was published in an academic journal in 2002 on home automation and its influence on the lives of housewives, she allegedly copied around 60 sentences and most of the tables from the thesis of her student, identified by her surname Song.

Both papers had the same survey period and respondents, and the same conclusion as well.

Park denied the allegation, arguing she had quoted a part of Song's thesis, which was a joint research project funded by her.

``I provided financial assistance to my student to help her work on a thesis and later used part of the research documents,'' Park said. ``I'm very sorry to have used similar expressions in my thesis, but it's not plagiarism as I used different analytical tools.''

A professor of a Seoul university said on condition of anonymity, ``It is not uncommon for a professor to publish a thesis based on his or her students' papers, using different analytical methods. That's not plagiarism, but it's also not a desirable practice.''

In 2006, then education minister Kim Byong-joon stepped down from his post taking responsibility for a thesis plagiarism scandal only 12 days after taking office.

Kim admitted that he had published the same research paper in two academic journals in 2001, when he was a professor of Kookmin University in Seoul, as if they were separate papers as part of government-funded research.

Kim had also been under suspicion for plagiarizing a student's thesis in a paper.

gallantjung@koreatimes.co.kr