South Korean Professor Jailed for Coercing Students to Write Papers for Daughter

Lee M, a former professor at a private university in Seoul, South Korea, has been sentenced to 3.6 years in jail in a case from a decade ago where the professor coerced his students to write a research paper for his daughter's admission. A lower court earlier gave the prison term to the professor of Sungkyunkwan University's School of Pharmacy. Now the Supreme Court has upheld it. According to South Korean media, the case dates back to as early as 2012. Lee's daughter, identified as A in court documents, was in her second year of high school. Lee asked his lab students to undertake animal experiments that his daughter was supposed to do. The students did and also prepared reports which the daughter was supposed to present at a conference. The daughter won an award at the conference. This award helped the daughter to gain admission to a university's "Science Talent Special Admissions" program.

The abuse of power continued. In 2016, Lee asked his students to conduct “stress-induced animal experiments” for an undergraduate research program his daughter applied to. The students dedicated three months to the project while the daughter visited the lab two or three times during this period for observation. She even went to Canada as an exchange student while the experiments were ongoing. When the results contradicted the initial hypothesis, Lee allegedly instructed the students to fabricate the data, Chosun Daily reported. The daughter again received an award with her name mentioned as the sole author. The report said that one of Lee's students even put in 54 hours of work by translating the paper into Braille. Then in 2018, all these ghostwritten papers were submitted for the daughter's admission to Seoul National University's Dental School.

The background work was reported to the education ministry in 2019 which conducted a special investigation. Both Lee and his daughter were indicted in 2019. In the first trial in 2024, a court sentenced Lee to 3.6 years' jail and his daughter to 10 months' jail and two years' suspension from the university. Lee appealed against the ruling and returned 125 million Korean won in restitution and penalties. But the Supreme Court upheld the punishment. The mother was also found to have instructed her students to manipulate some data to better support the experiment's hypothesis, Korea Times reported.