Talk:Plagiarism/@comment-90.190.37.139-20110304102205

I knew tuition was high, but it seems that now you can buy your degree from the London School of Economics. Now only should his Ph.D. be revoked, but his Ph.D. advisor, David Held, should be fired. The head of the LSE, Howard Davies already resigned, which is the honorable thing to do.

It is amazing that given the amount of money he has at his disposal, he did not hire a better ghost writer, one that would rearrange sentences and paragraphs, not just cut and paste. Surely there are plenty of unemployed economist out there!

Yes, ghost writing of all types of academic work, from essays to Ph.D. theses is common. Check the web!I was offered a job doing that once. The problem actually continues among foreign academics who are stars in their own countries but are required to publish in English, so they hire native English writers to write their papers. In this case it would be easy to avoid the ethical dilemma by just giving co-authorship, but a Ph.D. thesis is supposed to contain work that if not completely independent, was at least led by the Ph.D. candidate, and written exclusively by person seeking the degree