Academic dishonesty
Academic dishonesty is a form of cheating that occurs within an educational setting. It can include forms of plagiarism, although not all acts of academic dishonesty constitute plagiarism (for example, a student who 'makes up' data and claims them to be the results of experiments they ran would be guilty of academic dishonesty but not plagiarism). It occurs as early as kindergarten and as late as college; very rarely, graduate students and professors commit academic dishonesty.
Punishments for academic dishonesty vary according to the age of the party involved and the nature of the infraction. In high school, a standard penalty for cheating is a failing grade, but in college it often results in expulsion or worse consequences: in rare instances, middle-aged college professors have been fired when it was discovered that they plagiarized during college or graduate school.
All parties involved in the dishonesty—not just the individual whose grade in increased by it—are usually punished. In a 2002 plagiarism scandal at the University of Virginia, 45 students were expelled and three graduates' degrees were revoked.
The scientific peer review process places considerable reliance on the moral integrity of the participants, and therefore academic dishonesty can often go unnoticed. If found out, however, the penalties are very severe -- it is usually the end of the perpetrator's career. Therefore clear-cut cases of dishonesty are rare, especially in more reputed fora, although not nonexistent.