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Lund suspends ten students for cheating

Ten students were suspended from Lund University in southern Sweden this week after getting caught cheating, as reports of academic dishonesty at the university continue to skyrocket.

Lund suspends ten students for cheating

School authorities have been forced to suspend ten students at Lund University after they were caught cheating, wrote the Sydsvenskan newspaper on Wednesday.

The students were suspected after having been caught faking interviews and illegally collaborating in their papers, as well as plagiarizing material, wrote the local Sydsvenskan newspaper on Wednesday.

One student who had previously been suspended from the university was caught for a second time, this time taking other people’s interviews and trying to pass them off as his own for his master’s thesis.

The student was suspended for four months.

Another suspended student was a woman who was caught with “cheat sheets” written on a pink napkin that she took in to an exam.

The woman told authorities that they were just study notes that she accidentally took into the exam, however as she was caught with the napkin in her hand during the exam, it was deemed that the incident was no mistake.

She was suspended for two months by the university as punishment.

The number of reported cases of cheating at Lund have grown rapidly in recently years, jumping nearly 80 percent since 2008 when 53 cases were reported, resulting in disciplinary action for all but nine students.

By 2011, however, the number of students reported for cheating had ballooned to 95, of which 28 students were eventually freed from any suspicions.

Sanna Håkansson of the university’s Disciplinary Board claims that it’s hard to predict how many more cases will occur, though that it’s “not unusual” to see such figures.

“The most common form of cheating is plagiarism, and this is something we see in a big way every year,” she told the paper.

TT/The Local/og

twitter.com/thelocalsweden

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MINISTER

Austrian minister steps down over plagiarism accusations

Austrian minister Christine Aschbacher resigned from her cabinet post in charge of labour, families and youth on Saturday following allegations some of her university work was plagiarised.

Austrian minister steps down over plagiarism accusations
Austrian minister Christine Aschbacher has resigned in the face of plagiarism accusations. Photo: Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP
A conservative from Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's OeVP party, Aschbacher said she had stepped down to “protect my family”, complaining of “hostility, political agitation and attacks… with unbearable force”.
   
Aschbacher's 2006 master's thesis displayed “plagiarism, incorrect quotations and lack of knowledge of the German language”, alleged blogger Stefan Weber, who specialises in sniffing out academic fraud.
   
At the time, she graduated with high marks from the University of Applied Sciences in Wiener Neustadt, south of Austrian capital Vienna.
   
Weber has levelled the same allegations at a thesis she submitted in May last year — in the depths of the first wave of coronavirus — to the Technical University of Bratislava in neighbouring Slovakia.
 
   
He claimed the work contained “never-before-seen depths of gobbledygook, nonsense and plagiarism” and that more than one-fifth of the text had been lifted from other sources without citations, in particular an article from Forbes magazine.
   
Under attack by the opposition, Aschbacher “rejected” what she called Weber's “insinuations”.
   
Kurz wrote on Twitter that he “respected” her decision to resign, after the scandal piled pressure on a government facing criticism for its management of the second wave of Covid-19, widely seen as chaotic.
   
The chancellor added that he would name a successor on Monday.
   
Academic plagiarism is a regular charge levelled at politicians in the German-speaking world, where leaders often brandish postgraduate qualifications.
   
In Germany, two conservatives, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Annett Schavan, stepped down from the defence and education ministries in 2011 and 2013 over similar scandals, while current centre-left Families Minister Franziska Giffey has been dogged by plagiarism allegations for years.
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