Senator’s Thesis Turns Out to Be Remix of Others’ Works, Uncited

So it turns out that this senator's 14-page master's thesis was largely plagiarized/quoted without attribution from two other articles... How embarrassing, for him and for the government as a whole. I think the worst part is that he's trying to say he didn't do anything wrong, and his staff is making excuses for it. But, being a military person, isn't he supposed to be a man of his word and take responsibility for his actions?

I'm also concerned by the fact that this paper was accepted as a master's thesis. The NYT article published the paper page by page and it's really not up to the standard I would expect for a thesis, something that's supposed to be the culmination of months or years of research and effort. I think it reflects pretty poorly on the university in general. Did his professor even read it? I can't imagine turning in a paper like that at any point in my academic career and not having a professor say something like "you go entire pages without attributing anything you're saying."

I think the system encourages plagiarism to continue when they accept work like this which, even if you weren't familiar with the works plagiarized, is fairly obviously not well-researched.

What do you guys think?

I'm not surprised, to be quite honest. Some of them seem to be dumber than a sack of bricks on a good day.

It's still disgusting that he made it through with the plagiarized paper and kids who work and work on papers can't make it through or get a decent, passing grade.

I agree. It feels like too often the professors just don't care enough to see if a student is struggling and that doesn't help matters. Actually a lot of students plagiarize because they slip through the cracks - they don't learn what they're supposed to earlier on and have to cheat to make the deadline.

Not saying that's what happened with this guy, he just seems like a jerk haha. But who knows.

Oh, I have to agree wholeheartedly with that. It's all about test scores so things like this fall through the cracks.

Imo, most politicians have that jerk-streak about them. You'd have to in order to be in the spotlight 24/7.