Kjerkol’s lawyer believes that the university cannot cancel the master’s degree

Lawyer Marianne Klausen speaks NRK and Chrono that Nord University has no legal basis for canceling the thesis. Together with Kjerkol and her fellow student, she now wants to use the three-week deadline they have to assess whether they should appeal the decision.

From the student council’s explanation and justification, which became known on Friday evening, it appears that Nord University’s latest plagiarism check shows a text coincidence of 43 per cent with various other sources distributed over 461 blocks of text. In the plagiarism check that was carried out in 2021 after the thesis was submitted, text overlap with other sources showed 19 per cent.

That one finds textual similarity with other sources can, for example, be that the table of contents is almost the same, writes Khrono.

– It is important to bear in mind that neither the university nor the Board for Student Affairs has assumed that more text matches have been found now than were found in 2021, says Klausen.

She believes that there must be some restrictions on the right to cancel. In general, the university must consider that the censorship decision from 2021 is invalid, and new and relevant information must have emerged in the case.

On Saturday, Kjerkol himself commented on the tribunal’s findings of 43 percent text coincidence in a reply to a post on Facebook.

– 43 per cent in the most recent report also includes hits on the task itself and everything that has been written about the task since 20 January, for example VG and other media’s articles. The tribunal has made its decision on the basis of the same findings on text similarity that were also known in the original censorship, i.e. text similarity of 19 per cent, she wrote.