Plagiarism is no laughing matter, my friends!

And you’d think that college professors would know how serious it is, but here we are, folks!

Check out this story from Reddit’s “Pro Revenge” page and prepare to be impressed by how this student handled things.

My ex-advisor plagiarized my work, so I exposed her and that cost her job.

“Back in 2013 I was a graduate student pursuing my master’s degree.

That was my last year in the program (we had 24 months to finish all the work and the dissertation).

My advisor was a professor who was very well-known and experienced on my field of work, lets call her Janet.

They were well acquainted with each other.

Janet and I had worked together with research since my college days as I became part of an undergraduate research with her.

At that point we had been working for about four years and as any advisor-student relationship we more had our disagreements quite often.

Janet was used to doing her experiments a certain, archaic, way.

I knew there were better uses of our grants money and always tried to push toward a more advanced method, especially correlating data collection and statistics.

Success!

However, our relationship was always good.

I knew her husband and had been to her house numerous times. She was a little set on her ways, but we managed to make good progress on our field.

Anyhow, by the end of 2013, I presented my dissertation to the department and was approved with flying colors.

My data still wasn’t published in any paper as I wanted to have more analysis in different areas to make a more robust and better paper. With that said, my dissertation was published and by all reasons that is my work and my experiments.

After I got my MS, I decided to pursue a PhD.

While I was still going to work in the same field, I wanted to use different techniques and thus talked with Janet about going to pursue a PhD under a different professor in another university.

She always encouraged me to do better and look for ways to diversify my views.

I went ahead and contacted a professor outside my country in another university to pursue my PhD.

I got approved and soon moved away.

For the next two years I still kept contact with Janet, but on the third she stopped responding.

Wait a second…

Initially I thought she had changed her e-mail or something, but didn’t think much of it.

Time flew by and in 2017, while reading papers and writing my own. I came across a paper that was strangely similar with my research.

Interested in it, I opened it up to read.

For my shock, it was a paper by my ex-advisor. She was up as advisor and another guy, who from his curriculum is her current master’s student. Reading the title I thought “Hey, that’s neat. She continued researching it.”

But boy I was wrong.

Reading the paper I got increasingly angry.

That wasn’t  new research. It was MY research!

My data was all in that paper, even my graphs and tables.

Initially I thought “Oh well, she’s also an author and if she is citing it, there shouldn’t be a problem”. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. My name was nowhere near that paper as they claimed that research as original.

Now, I was livid. I sent an e-mail to Janet confronting her, which was never replied to. However, I am not a pushover and will never allow people to claim my own work as theirs.

She made a mistake by using my data. I’m a researcher and I keep everything I ever worked on saved in external SSD’s encrypted and on my own possession. All cataloged with date entries and even had my own dissertation to prove my work.

They got down to business.

In my country, research is financed by the governmental grants. I wrote an e-mail to the Dean of the grant’s institution. Explaining all the situation, with proof of everything. I also sent an e-mail to journal in which that was published contesting their paper and explaining everything.

It didn’t take longer than fifteen days for me to get a follow-up.

The institution responsible for the grant was furious. They cut all financial aid for her and her student, and made a formal requirement to the university requesting her immediate termination.

The journal retracted the paper and is now suing her for plagiarism.

Now, after all these years, I learned that she was indeed fired and haven’t been able to work in the field ever since. I never met her again and have no intention of ever doing so.

Now, my work is published and I’m recognized by my contributions in the field.

Maybe that was a petty thing to do. But I couldn’t allow people to get away with claiming my work as theirs.”

Let’s see what people had to say about this.

This person doesn’t think they did anything wrong.

Another individual didn’t think this was petty.

One reader said the professor deserved it.

Another person said the professor has probably done it before.

And one person said this was PRO REVENGE.

I’m pretty surprised that a professor would try to pull this off…

What a shame…

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.