SINGAPORE: Brooke Lim Ke Xin, also known as Sugaresque on social media, is a local influencer and owns a tuition company called Classicle Club.
Recently, Lim was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal after an essay she published on Apr 18 was discovered to be riddled with uncredited material from other sources. Now, a petition has been launched online for her acceptance into the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) to be revoked.
The change.org petition was started by Ms Brianna Lee and reads, “We strongly implore UCLA’s admissions department to launch a thorough investigation on Brooke Lim Ke Xin’s college admissions essay as she has displayed recent and ongoing unethical conduct by plagiarising from others, seeking to boost her professional credibility as a writer through her plagiarised essay by means of self-promotion for her personal brand, and failing to take any accountability for her actions.”
The petition mentions that Lim’s tuition company teaches English to Singaporean students and she coaches essay writing.
“With this background in mind, her plagiarism is made worse as it shows a blatant disregard towards the ethics of academia and is very much indicative of her own moral integrity as someone from within the educational sector,” the petition adds, going into detail about the plagiarised essay, and saying that over half of its original version had been taken from several books and articles.
“An exposé written on her states that the similarities include: sentences, whole paragraphs, plot points, and specific details. While each word has been painstakingly paraphrased, the overall structure of full paragraphs are copied with no credit whatsoever to the original creators, despite the obvious correlations. Over 70% of the original essay is not her original work.”
The detailed exposé of Lim’s plagiarism, which has happened more than once, can be found here.
On Monday (Apr 24), the influencer apologised over her TikTok account for making the “very serious and regrettable mistake of plagiarising” and added that she had taken the essay down already.
https://www.tiktok.com/@sugaresque/video/7225175290849283329?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7173200040750482945
After the apology video was issued, Ms Lee added an update to the petition, saying, “From this, it can be seen that her apology is disingenuous. It is very clear to the discerning eye that Brooke is not sorry that she plagiarised, she is sorry that she got caught.
Brooke has also plagiarised interview responses and tellonym replies in the past, which shows a clear pattern of behaviour. It would not be unreasonable to suspect that her admissions essay would have also been plagiarised in some way as well. Therefore, this petition still stands and we strongly encourage UCLA’s admissions team to launch an investigation and rethink her admittance into UCLA.” /TISG
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