Talk:Plagiarism/@comment-133.45.178.129-20110301074024/@comment-141.161.149.6-20110301083712

I highly doubt that you really are an examiner of PhD theses. Or perhaps you are, but at a corrupt or failing institution. In any event, I can assure you that if a graduate student in my department (at a top American university) submitted a thesis with this number of plagiarized paragraphs, they would be brought before a disciplinary panel on charges of academic wrongdoing, and most likely stripped of their PhD.

I agree that professors rarely read introductory chapters with the kind of close attention that they should. Probably more theses are plagiarized than are detected. But make no mistake; if the above instances are proven, Saif Gaddafi plagiarized his PhD in clear breach of LSE's own standards of academic integrity, and the academics involved in supervising and examining him appear to have been negligent in not detecting these irregularities sooner.