Overseas law grad who tried to cover up plagiarism incidents denied admission to the Bar

Source: Straits Times
Article Date: 23 Apr 2025
Author: Selina Lum

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon also barred her from making a fresh application for five years.

An overseas law graduate who was applying to be admitted to the Singapore Bar failed to disclose that she was found to have collaborated with another candidate in a paper for the Bar exam in 2020.

She also failed to disclose that while she was studying in a university in Britain, she was found to have committed some form of plagiarism in three incidents between 2018 and 2019.

She even tried to conceal her academic wrongdoings by not giving her consent for the university to disclose the information to the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC).

The woman’s application to be admitted as a lawyer was dismissed by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon. “Indeed, this was a quintessential case for doing so,” said the Chief Justice in written grounds issued on April 21.

He also barred her from making a fresh application for five years, saying that her conduct was more serious than other cases involving academic dishonesty.

“The applicant’s pattern of dishonesty, including her litany of academic offences involving passing off the work of others as her own and her lack of candour... evidenced serious dishonesty and a persistent unwillingness to come to grips with the nature and gravity of her ethical failures,” he said.

The woman, who was 28 years old when the Chief Justice heard her admission application in October 2024, was not named.

She had asked for her identity to be redacted and submitted a memo from a psychiatrist stating that she had suicidal thoughts.

Chief Justice Menon directed the woman in November 2024 to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the Institute of Mental Health. No report has yet been submitted.

He said the publication of the court’s grounds of decision cannot be placed on hold indefinitely, particularly where its reasons may have relevance to the wider community.

He said he was publishing the grounds on an anonymised basis for a fixed interim period; the unredacted form could be published later if the woman does not provide further support for her request.

Graduates from approved foreign universities who are seeking admission to the Bar have to first take the Part A Bar exam. They then take the Part B exam, which is also taken by graduates from local law schools.

The woman, who graduated from university in 2019, first attempted the Part A exam in 2020 but failed two papers. She re-sat one of the papers later that year, submitting four answer scripts for it. The final answer script contained a significantly fuller answer to one question, compared with the three submitted earlier.

The answer scripts of the woman and another candidate, identified only as Ms Tan, were flagged with 80 per cent similarity and 32 blocks of matching texts.

The Singapore Institute of Legal Education (Sile) concluded that she had collaborated with Ms Tan, but she disagreed with the finding.

She retook the papers she had failed and passed the Part A exam in 2022 on her fifth attempt. In 2023, she passed the Part B exam.

In June 2023, she applied to be admitted to the Bar, and later filed a supporting affidavit without declaring the Part A incident.

After she was queried about this, she said she genuinely believed that she had been given an informal warning and that she would not need to declare the incident.

In April 2024, the AGC invited her to withdraw her admission application. She agreed.

Around the same time, the AGC came across a reference to the woman while it was investigating a separate incident of possible plagiarism involving a group assignment when the woman was a university student.

The AGC contacted the university asking for relevant information, but the university replied that the woman did not consent to it providing the information.

After the AGC sought clarifications from the woman, she admitted that she was part of a group whose submission was investigated for possible plagiarism. She eventually consented to the release of the information.

The information showed that on two occasions in 2018, her failure to attribute material from other sources was found to be “poor academic practice”, while a third incident in June 2019 was found to be “moderate plagiarism”.

The Attorney-General, Sile and the Law Society of Singapore, which are involved in the admission of lawyers, filed objections to the woman’s admission.

The Chief Justice noted that at the hearing before him, she finally admitted that she had collaborated with Ms Tan, but she confessed only when faced with the prospect of a finding by the court that she had been lying.