The Tokyo High Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling that imposed a suspended sentence on a former medical professor for leaking questions in a state dentistry examination in 2000.
The high court rejected Itsuo Ueda's appeal against the Tokyo District Court ruling, handed down June 26, which sentenced the former professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido to 10 months in prison, suspended for three years.
During the trial, Ueda, 60, pleaded innocent to the charges against him, saying he had simply exchanged information with a former professor of Ohu University in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture.
But presiding Judge Atsushi Semba said the information that Ueda had leaked was limited to dentistry exam questions and made it easier for Ohu University to make its graduation exams similar to questions for the March 2000 National Dentistry Examination.
According to the ruling, then Ohu University professor Kenji Kusunoki obtained questions included in the national exam from Ueda, who was a member of the exam board, and then based 18 oral hygiene questions in an Ohu University graduation exam, held Feb. 17-18, 2000, on that information.
He then briefed his students on 11 of the questions during a lecture Feb. 29 that year, in violation of the Dental Practitioners Law.
Ohu University, a private institute, ranked lowest in the oral hygiene section of the 2000 exam after the then Health and Welfare Ministry was tipped off about the leak and changed all 25 questions.