A South Korean professor has been jailed for forcing his students to write research papers for his daughter. (AI image)
Lee Im, a former professor at a private university in Seoul, South Korea, was sentenced to 3.6 years in prison in a decade-old case in which the professor forced his students to write a research paper for his daughter’s admission.
A lower court had earlier sentenced a professor at the College of Pharmacy at Sungkyunkwan University to prison. Now the Supreme Court has upheld it.According to South Korean media, the case dates back to 2012. Lee’s daughter, identified as “A” in court documents, was in her second year of high school. Lee asked his laboratory students to perform experiments on animals that his daughter was supposed to perform. The students did this and also prepared the reports that the daughter was supposed to present at the conference.
The daughter won an award at the conference.This award helped her daughter gain admission into the university’s Special Admissions for Scientific Talents programme.The abuse of power continued. In 2016, Lee asked his students to conduct “stress-induced animal experiments” for an undergraduate research program to which his daughter applied. The students devoted three months to the project while the daughter visited the laboratory two or three times during this period for observation.
She even went to Canada as an exchange student while the trials were going on. When the results contradicted the initial hypothesis, Lee allegedly ordered the students to fabricate data, the Chosun Daily reported.The daughter again received an award with her name mentioned as the sole author. The report stated that one of Lee’s students spent 54 hours working through translating the paper into Braille.Then in 2018, all these written papers were submitted in order for the daughter to be accepted into Seoul National University College of Dentistry.The background information was reported to the Department for Education in 2019, which conducted a special investigation. Both Lee and his daughter were indicted in 2019.In the first trial in 2024, the court sentenced Li to 3.6 years in prison, his daughter to 10 months in prison, and a two-year suspension from university. Lee appealed the ruling and returned 125 million KRW in damages and penalties. But the Supreme Court upheld the punishment.It was also revealed that the mother asked her students to process some data to better support the experiment’s hypothesis, the Korea Times reported.
