Norway’s higher education minister, accused of copying other students’ work, including mistakes, in his master’s thesis resigned on Friday, AFP reported.

“I made a big mistake,” said Sandra Borch at an emergency press conference. “I used texts from other works without reference to the sources, sorry,” she admitted.

The Norwegian press previously reported disturbing similarities between papers submitted by Sandra Borch in 2014, when she was a student, and other texts, including papers by two other students, without citing or referencing them.

Excerpts posted on X (formerly Twitter) by the student who shared the story reveal, among other things, that Sandra Borch took an entire passage from the dissertation verbatim, including several typos.

The case is made all the more awkward because last week her ministry decided to refer to the Supreme Court the case of a student who was acquitted on appeal of charges of self-plagiarism for reusing passages from one of her own texts.

Sandra Borch, a member of the centrist party that mainly defends the interests of the rural population, was appointed higher education minister last year after serving as agriculture minister in the center-left government from 2021 to 2023.

His doctoral thesis in law ten years ago at the University of Tromsø was on safety regulations in the oil industry.

His resignation followed the resignations of several other members of the same government in recent months, usually due to conflicts of interest.