A plagiarism scandal rocks Norway’s government

By MARK LEWIS
Associated Press

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — The specter of academic plagiarism — a hot topic in the U.S. — has now reached the heart of Norwegian politics. It has toppled one government minister and leaving a second fighting for her political career. Sandra Borch, Norway’s minister for research and higher education, resigned last week after a business student in Oslo discovered that tracts of Borch’s master’s thesis, including spelling mistakes, were copied without attribution from a different author. The student got upset about Borch’s zealous approach to punishing academic infractions: After several students fought cases of “self-plagiarism” — where they lifted whole sections from their own previous work — and were acquitted in lower courts, the minister took them to the Supreme Court.