Ex-professor receives finalized prison term for forcing students to write paper for daughter's admission

A former professor has received a finalized prison term for making her students write a research paper for use in her daughter's admission to a top dental school, legal sources said Wednesday.

The former professor, who taught at Sungkyunkwan University's School of Pharmacy at the time, was convicted of obstruction of business for instructing her students to conduct animal experiments for her daughter's college research project and write up a paper based on the results in 2016 and 2017.

The paper helped the daughter gain admission to Seoul National University's School of Dentistry in 2018.

In a May ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court's sentence of 3 and a half years in prison for the former professor and a suspended 10-month term for her daughter.

The mother was also found to have instructed her students to manipulate some data to better support the experiment's hypothesis.

The daughter, meanwhile, was listed as the paper's co-author even though she had only participated in the experiments two or three times as an observer, and also received an award for the work, which was published in an internationally recognized journal.

The disgraced scholar was dismissed from Sungkyunkwan University in June 2019, while Seoul National University revoked her daughter's admission in August that year.

Yonhap