One of the first things an undergraduate is required to learn is give due credit whenever he uses another person’s ideas, thoughts or expressions. Otherwise, they will be accused of presenting them as their original work and, by doing so, purloining them.

They are also required to give credit to any piece of information, be it a fact or a statistic, when it is not deemed to be common knowledge. It is the same with paraphrased words, either spoken or written, of another person. They must adhere to the strict rule on attribution as long as he continues to pursue advanced studies.

But it is saddening to find that this rule was ignored, not just by one lawmaker-elect forced to leave the ruling Saenuri Party, but by so many other lawmakers-elect holding doctorates. They include Rep. Chung Se-kyun, a member of the supreme council of the main opposition Democratic United Party, who was reelected to the National Assembly on April 11 for a fifth term.

The two parties will have to conduct inquiries into the plagiarism cases involving their lawmakers-elect and take appropriate disciplinary action against them when they are confirmed to have committed an act of plagiarism. Otherwise, Moon Dae-sung, an Olympic gold medalist in taekwondo-turned university professor, would believe that he was made a scapegoat when he was forced to abandon his affiliation with the Saenuri Party.

Plagiarism by politicians came to the fore when Moon ran for election to the National Assembly. Shortly after he won the election in a Busan district, Kookmin University, which had awarded him with a doctorate, determined he had committed plagiarism. He left the party when it threatened to deprive him of membership if he refused to give it up on his own.

As public pressure mounted on Moon to leave the party and abandon his parliamentary seat, it was disclosed that Rep. Chung, a senior politician who once served as leader of the opposition party’s predecessor, reportedly plagiarized his doctorate dissertation as well.

According to news reports, more than 10 pages of the paper that he submitted to Kyung Hee University for a doctorate in 2004 were copied from a dissertation a graduate student wrote for his master’s degree in business administration at Korea University in 1991. The only differences reportedly were some words that were replaced with synonyms. Yet, the doctorate paper provided no attribution.

To the allegation of plagiarism, Chung says he does not find it worthwhile to respond. Instead, he makes a dubious claim that he committed no plagiarism because the paper he quoted, though without any attribution, was mentioned in the bibliography.

He needs to be reminded of one of the criteria used by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology for plagiarism: It constitutes a case of plagiarism when six or more words from the source material are copied in a consecutive order unless they are put in quotation marks. It does so even if they are attributed to the source material.

If he still believes he is innocent as he claims, all Chung needs to do is ask Kyung Hee University to review his paper again and determine whether or not it contains plagiarism. For its part, the university will have to do so, regardless of a request from Chung.

The Saenuri Party demands that Chung be deprived of his membership to the Democratic United Party if he is proven to have plagiarized. It has every right to make such a demand, given that the opposition party made a similar demand when Moon was found to have committed plagiarism.

The dispute over plagiarism cannot end there, though, because several more lawmakers-elect of the ruling party are suspected of plagiarism. Among them is a lawmaker-elect from a Gangwon district, whose doctorate paper allegedly contained parts of reports written by undergraduates. Public pressure will undoubtedly mount on the party to oust all of those whose culpability is proven.

At the same time, the universities that awarded doctorates to the lawmakers-elect despite their plagiarism, together with the faculty members who read their papers and approved of them though they were so flawed, will have to be held accountable.