Norway’s Higher Education Minister resigned on Friday after being accused of copying, errors included, from other students’ work in her master’s dissertation.
“I have made a terrible mistake,” Sandra Borch said during an emergency press conference. “I used texts from other dissertations without providing any citations, and for that, I am sorry,” she confessed.
Earlier, Norwegian media had reported troubling similarities found in the dissertation that Borch submitted in 2014 as a student, and other texts, notably the dissertations of two other students, which she neither cited nor referenced.
In extracts published on X (formerly Twitter) by a student who exposed the scandal, it was revealed that Borch had copied an entire section verbatim, typos included, from another dissertation.
The scandal is particularly embarrassing as, last week, her Ministry had taken a self-plagiarism case - involving a student who reused parts of her own text - to the Supreme Court after the student was exonerated on appeal.
Elected from the centrist party, which mainly represents rural interests, Borch was appointed Higher Education Minister last year. She held the agriculture portfolio between 2021 and 2023 in the centre-left government.
Her Law dissertation, submitted a decade ago at the University of Tromso, was on safety regulations in the oil sector.
Her resignation follows several others from the same government in recent months, typically due to issues of conflict of interest.
