By Jung Min-ho



More than 60 percent of Seoul National University (SNU) undergraduates majoring in natural science or engineering have experience in fabricating research data, according to a recent survey.



Among 95 participants in a survey conducted in June by the SNU Journal, a student newspaper, 63 percent said that they "have been involved in doctoring or making up data without actually going through with an experiment."



The survey result indicates that the international scandal of Hwang Woo-suk, who was fired from SNU in 2007 following a series of academic frauds in his stem cell research, did little to curb the culture of the school.



When asked the reason for fudging the facts, 75 percent of survey participants said they did it "to make their experiment report match the theory."



The second-most popular answer was "to receive a favorable evaluation," with 10 percent of respondents.



Also, 84 percent of respondents said they have seen or heard of such academic fraud happening from someone else.



The most striking thing about the survey results are that most of the students apparently do not take such fraud seriously.



While 66 percent of them believe such academic fraud was a "problem, but it isn't very serious," 9 percent said it was "no problem."



Moreover, 85 percent of the students said they have received papers from others who took the same class in the previous semester for "reference." Among those who did, 44 percent copied directly from them at least once, whereas 52 percent used them just for reference.



While 51 percent of respondents said copying other people's papers is a "problem, but it isn't very serious," 18 percent said they do not consider copying them as plagiarism.



