Academic fraud is any dishonest submission of work for academic evaluation, whether as a requirement for a class or degree, or for publication (including self-publication). Academic fraud is punishable under several codes of conduct, including those of the university, of academic journals and associations, of copyright law, and other intellectual property law, at least.
The academic penalities for fraud include failure of class, suspension or expulsion from a program of study, and revocation of degrees awarded for the fraudulent work. For employed researchers the penalties vary but can include suspension without pay, demotion, and termination of employment or contract. The legal penalties for copyright violation may include damages, fines, and imprisonment depending on the jurisdiction.
Plagiarism is broadly defined as claiming that others' work is one's own. In practice, you are likely to be accused of plagiarism if
Plagiarism is the most commonly detected infraction in the social and business sciences. Don't risk being accused. Some definitions:
A reference which is documented by an accurate entry in your bibliography (or in a footnote, but this is an obsolete style in our fields).
Any use of information provided by others must be accompanied by a citation unless it is common knowledge of practitioners in the field. "Use" includes paraphrases and construction of graphs from tabular data. When data is transformed, this should be mentioned and the transformation described accurately enough for a reader to reproduce it.
Information (textual or graphical) which is copied exactly from the original work.
All quotations must be delimited with quotation marks or as an indented block quote:
This is a block quote.
and accompanied by a citation. The citation and the quotation must be clearly associated.
Plagiarism is typically both a violation of academic standards and of copyright. Plagiarism is not limited to exact quotations, but includes all uncited use of others' work. Whether paraphrases and translations are copyright violations as well depends on the details.
Do not plagiarize. Intentional plagiarism is ethically indefensible, and I won't even try to defend you. It is invariably punished severely by the university when detected, often with expulsion, and revocation of the degree if already awarded. Much plagiarism is easily detected automatically. The University of Tsukuba now requires that all theses be subjected to plagiarism detection software, and many authors and organizations regularly run web searches for plagiarism of their material. I run the software on early drafts as well.
Other forms of academic fraud such as falsifying data or analytical results are somewhat harder to detect, but the chance of passing it off is not high. In proportion to the difficulty of detection, the penalties are more severe. Just don't.
Excessive quotation is not plagiarism. However, it may be a copyright violation, it may be considered academically dishonest, and it is definitely not acceptable. If you will not explain your ideas in your own words, you don't belong in graduate school and I won't help you. I will require revision of drafts that contain unnecessary quotations.
See also this infographic.
Cheating on examinations, helping others to cheat on examinations, writing reports for others, failing to report or lying about academic misconduct of others, and falsifying reports of others' misconduct are all serious offenses and may be punished up to expulsion. If you know of others' misconduct and are considering whether to report it, be aware that if it is detected before submission for grading it will be treated much more leniently. In some cases when based on a report of another student leniency may be granted as well for several reasons.
Furthermore, many cheaters become "addicted" to cheating and eventually get caught because they cheat more than they "need" to. They usually leave evidence behind which becomes clear when the individual's record is viewed with suspicion, and they are seen to have created a pattern of cheating over a period. That normally results in expulsion. Such behavior is likely to continue in the future, with potentially severe consequences for employers as well as the individual. Helping cheaters go undetected is rarely doing them a favor, and the social harm is great.