Bribery
Bribery is an act of giving money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient. Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty.
The bribe is the gift bestowed to influence the recipient's conduct. It may be any money, good, right in action, property, preferment, privilege, emolument, object of value, advantage, or merely a promise or undertaking to induce or influence the action, vote, or influence of a person in an official or public capacity.
Cheating
Cheating can take the form of crib notes, looking over someone's shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding an exam or exercise. Many elaborate methods of cheating have been developed over the years. For instance, students have been documented hiding notes in the bathroom toilet tank, in the brims of their baseball caps, or up their sleeves. Also, the storing of information in graphing calculators, pagers, cell phones, and other electronic devices has cropped up since the information revolution began. While students have long surreptitiously scanned the tests of those seated near them, some students actively try to aid those who are trying to cheat. Methods of secretly signaling the right answer to friends are quite varied, ranging from coded sneezes or pencil tapping to high-pitched noises beyond the hearing range of most teachers. Some students have been known to use more elaborate means, such as using a system of repetitive body signals like hand movements or foot jerking to distribute answers (i.e. where a tap of the foot could correspond to answer "A", two taps for answer "B", and so on).
Cheating differs from most other forms of academic dishonesty, in that people can engage in it without benefiting themselves academically at all. For example, a student who illicitly telegraphed answers to a friend during a test would be cheating, even though the student's own work is in no way affected. Another example of academic dishonesty is a dialogue between students in the same class but in two different time periods, both of which a test is scheduled for that day. If the student in the earlier time period informs the other student in the later period about the test; that is considered academic dishonesty, even though the first student has not benefited himself.
Deception
Deception is providing false information to a teacher/instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. Examples of this include taking more time on a take-home test than is allowed, giving a dishonest excuse when asking for a deadline extension, or falsely claiming to have submitted work. This type of academic misconduct is often considered softer than the more obvious forms of cheating, and otherwise-honest students sometimes engage in this type of dishonesty without considering themselves cheaters. It is also sometimes done by students who have failed to complete an assignment, to avoid responsibility for doing so.
Fabrication
Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes falsify data to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.
Bibliographical references are often fabricated, especially when a certain minimum number of references is required or considered sufficient for the particular kind of paper. This type of fabrication can range from referring to works whose titles look relevant but which the student did not read, to making up bogus titles and authors.
There is also the practice of dry-labbing--which can occur in chemistry or other lab courses, in which the teacher clearly expects the experiment to yield certain results (which confirm established laws), so the student starts from the results and works backward, calculating what the experimental data should be, often adding variation to the data. In some cases, the lab report is written before the experiment is conducted--in some cases, the experiment is never carried out. In either case, the results are what the instructor expects.
Impersonation
Impersonation is a form of cheating whereby a different person than the student assigned an assignment or exam completes it. Different from regular cheating, the academic work is totally 'outsourced' to another person or organization, usually for pay.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism, as defined in the 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, is the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." In academia, it is seen as the adoption or reproduction of original intellectual creations (such as concepts, ideas, methods, pieces of information or expressions, etc.) of another author (person, collective, organization, community or other type of author, including anonymous authors) without due acknowledgment, in contexts where originality is acknowledged and rewarded. This can range from borrowing without attribution a particularly apt phrase, to paraphrasing someone else's original idea without citation, to wholesale contract cheating.
The modern concept of plagiarism as immoral and originality as an ideal emerged in Europe only in the 18th century, while in the previous centuries authors and artists were encouraged to "copy the masters as closely as possible" and avoid "unnecessary invention". The 18th century new morals have been institutionalized and enforced prominently in the sectors of academia (including academic science, education, engineering etc.) and journalism, where plagiarism is now considered academic dishonesty and a breach of journalistic ethics, subject to sanctions like expulsion and other severe career damages. Not so in the arts, which have resisted in their long-established tradition of copying as a fundamental practice of the creative process, with plagiarism being still hugely tolerated by 21st-century artists. Lawmaking is a professional field which is not structured around the concept of originality and for which plagiarism is less relevant.
Plagiarism is not a crime but is disapproved more on the grounds of moral offence. It may be a case for civil law if it is so substantial to constitute copyright infringement.
Since 2000, discussions on the subjects of student plagiarism have increased with a major strand of this discussion centring on the issue of how best students can be helped to understand and avoid plagiarism. Given the serious consequences that plagiarism has for students there has been a call for a greater emphasis on learning in order to help students avoid committing plagiarism.
Professorial misconduct
Professorial misconduct includes improper grading of students' papers and oral exams, grade fraud, deliberate negligence towards cheating or assistance in cheating. This can be done for reasons of personal bias towards students (favoritism) or a particular viewpoint (intellectual dishonesty), for a bribe, or to improve the teacher's own perceived performance by increasing the passing rate. It is still occasionally done for matters of ego or to procure sexual favors (sexual harassment).
Sabotage
Sabotage is when a student or professor prevents others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books, deleting data off of classmate's computer or otherwise willfully disrupting the experiments of others. Sabotage is usually only found in highly competitive, cutthroat environments, such as at extremely elite schools where class rankings are highly prized. Poor behavior and the low level disruption of other students' learning, however, is extremely common in all educational settings. Some medical-school librarians have noted that important articles--required reading for key courses--are frequently missing from bound journals--sliced out with razor blades, scalpels, or other sharp blades. Other journals will be marked up in crayon.