- There are many different forms of academic dishonesty. And I would like to share with you some of the different forms here. Plagiarism is the one that most people know about. This is taking the work or ideas of someone else and trying to pass them off as your own. And it doesn't matter whether that's done intentionally or unintentionally, it's still plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is where you take your own work and you submit that for a different purpose, perhaps, for a different course. 

But it's essentially work that you've done earlier. That's self-plagiarism. Fabrication, that's where you falsify data or information and you create that as part of your assignment or your submission. Assemblage is where you have a lot of cutting and pasting. So a student might cut and paste from various sources. And they may cite the references and provide the right citations for that. But most of the work is actually cut and paste. 

And there's little original thinking and very little original contribution. That's assemblage. So deception is where a student might say, look, I've missed the assignment. And their reason might be their cat died, when in fact, their cat is still alive. That's an example of deception. Bribery is where a student might bribe a professor, give them $100, for example, in order for a better grade on a particular course. Sabotage, this is where students deliberately get in the way or impede the progress of another student. Disruption is also similar. 

This is where a student might disrupt the learning process of another student in class or in the university. Impersonation, this is where, for example, you might get someone else to take an exam for you or submit an assignment for you pretending to be you. Unlawful collaboration. If, as an educator, you give students an individual assignment to do as an individual piece of work and later, you find out that a few students actually work collaboratively on that assignment, that would be an example of unlawful collaboration. 

Free-riding. You see this where you have teamwork. In a team of four students, for example, three students do most of the work. The fourth student actually contributes little to the activity. He or she would be a free rider. Facilitation of misconduct. So if you borrow work to a friend and you know that friend is going to copy that work, you've facilitated misconduct there. So that's also an academic offense. 

And finally, cheating. So an example would be a student who writes down the answers on the palm of their hand and looks at that in the exam. That would be an example of cheating. So you can see there's a whole multitude of different kinds of academic dishonesty. Over and above cheating and plagiarism, there are lots of different ways in which students can be dishonest. Not every academic offense carries the same level of seriousness. And the seriousness might be dependent on two things, the type of offense and the degree of the offense. 

And this often determines the kind of academic penalty that you'll give for it. You might consider offenses on a scale from offenses which are very, very mild, such as, for example, improper citation or referencing that's not been stated properly or extremely serious in the sense that a significant portion of the work is copied from somewhere else. So different levels of academic offense will carry different levels of seriousness, which determines different levels of academic penalty.