ph.d Plagiarism discovered.

The leader of the German national education committee and education secretary of Lower Saxony, Bernd Althusmann, last week admitted he may have made mistakes when citing passages in his PhD after allegations of plagiarism were made against him.

In the same week, aspiring politician Matthias Profrock, recently elected into the parliament of Baden-Wurttemberg, was stripped of his doctoral title, after large passages from his law PhD were found to have been copied.

The two are the latest in a growing line of politicians whose academic work has been found to have fallen short of the required standards, years after they were awarded their PhDs.

Earlier this year, defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg saw his political career come to an end after it was revealed he had copied large sections of texts in his law PhD without marking them appropriately as quotations. He was also stripped of the title of Dr.

Leading German MEP Silvana Koch-Mehrin has also resigned from her post and had her title removed.