Court maintains Moon was guilty of plagiarism

By Kim Rahn

Moon Dae-sung

A court has ruled that Moon Dae-sung, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), plagiarized his doctorate paper.

The Seoul Northern District Court, Thursday, dismissed a suit filed by Moon in March to nullify Kookmin University’s decision to cancel his Ph.D.

The court decision may affect his status at the top sporting body.

Moon, also a ruling Saenuri Party lawmaker, received his doctorate in August 2007 with a paper entitled: “Effect of Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation on Flexibility and Isokinetic Muscle Strength in Taekwondo Practitioners.”

In March 2012, a plagiarism allegation emerged as the paper was similar to a thesis written by another researcher. Kookmin then conducted an initial investigation and concluded in November of that year that Moon’s paper “goes beyond what is normally permitted by the academic community.”

After more investigation, the school confirmed that the paper was full of “serious plagiarisms” in February this year and stripped him of his degree.

Moon then filed a suit, saying he obtained approval for use of the content in his paper. Moon claimed that when he was writing the paper, a fellow researcher surnamed Kim was writing his own thesis, so he did not need to state he quoted Kim’s thesis and thus it was not plagiarism.

He also said the school’s decision was politically biased and the degree cancellation was invalid.

However, the court said, “According to the school’s study ethics committee, when a person uses others’ study results, the person should state in principle that they are quotations from an original paper. In exceptional cases where it is impossible to state so, the person should get approval from the author of the original paper.”

It said that although Kim’s paper was not completed in 2006 when Moon was also writing his own, Moon could still state that his contents were quotations.

“Moon used huge parts of Kim’s paper without changing a single word, but did not say he quoted them. Such an act is plagiarism whether or not he got permission from Kim.”

According to Kookmin’s investigation, Moon cut-and-pasted many parts of Kim’s thesis, even copying factual errors and misspellings in the original paper.

Moon, a former taekwondo practitioner, won a gold medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004, and became the IOC athletes’ council member in 2008.

He ran in the general election under the ruling party’s ticket in 2012 and won a National Assembly seat. He left the party that same year following the plagiarism accusations, but returned to it in February this year.