Betssy Chavez would have plagiarized 49% of her undergraduate thesis

Cabinet Aníbal Torres adds a new questioned member, this time being the Minister of Labour and Employment Promotion, Betssy Chavez, who would have plagiarized almost half of her thesis that earned her bachelor's degree at the Jorge Basadre National University in Tacna. After a specialized review, it was determined that up to 12 sheets of the research would have been literally copied from another work.

“In the specific analysis, complete pages have been found pasted and copied from different sources that have not been cited throughout the document. This is gross and badly done plagiarism,” said the researcher at the Universidad Científica del Sur, Percy Mayta, after reviewing the content of the research allegedly written by the congresswoman of Free Peru, Betsy Chavez.

Panorama revealed that one of the copied sources would be a United Nations report published in 2010. A dozen pages would have been copied from this one, while 16 pages would have been extracted from another work. According to plagiarism detection software, 49% of Chavez's research would already exist in other sources and would not have been properly cited.

“He's lucky because his thesis is from 2015. The University Law of 2014 proposes that there should be regulations, finally approved in 2016, where universities are required to require originality, to have ways of verifying similarity and, of course, that there is no plagiarism in documents. If that thesis had been reviewed with the current regulations, I would clearly not have been able to obtain a degree,” Mayta added.

CONTROVERSIAL RESPUESTA

“The power groups and their journalists say that 12 of the 396 pages of my thesis are plagiarism. Panorama and El Comercio must do a little more,” the congresswoman wrote on her Twitter account after Sunday asked for her disclaimers of alleged plagiarism in her thesis entitled “Prison treatment and its influence on the recidivism and habituality of prisoners of the Pocollay prison during 2012.”

Once the report was disseminated, Chávez published a statement through his social networks where he assured that “the identity of a thesis is determined based on the contribution obtained from fieldwork, the approach of the problem with its variables and the analysis of the information obtained”. Líneas below emphasizes that what is stated by the software “does not disable or diminish the value of the research work deployed, much less does it turn the thesis into “plagiarism” or “copy”.

Panorama managed to identify the sources from which the congresswoman had copied the information and compared it with the document submitted to the Jorge Basadre National University. An identically written paragraph was identified that in the original version had a footnote and although Chavez's thesis also had the signage, it did not record the source from which the idea had been drawn.

“(This thesis) would be useless. Definitely not. I can find half of what is being put in other sources. It is as if it were an Azángaro of information”, were the statements of the thesis advisor of the Catholic University, José Tavera. While these similarities have been found and the congresswoman has stated that it is not plagiarism, it is up to the university itself to initiate a formal research process to determine the validity of the work. This way it will be possible to decide whether Betssy Chavez plagiarized or not.

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