Fabricationinvolves the falsification, or outright invention, of work, documents, or information as part of any academic assignment. This might include the falsification of data in a lab report or the falsification of a bibliography in a writing assignment; it might mean inventing false statistics to support a claim or altering supportive evidence.
Falsification is essentially a lie we tell about what we actually did and/or how we did it.
Often students are tempted to falsify because they feel like their results are out of sync with the results of others – an experiment that didn’t work right, for instance – but understanding how that result went askew or how things went wrong can itself be a powerful learning experience. Being open to this sort of experience -- learning from and overcoming a set-back -- shows resiliency and is often referred to as having a growth mindset.
In the spring of 2019, CNN reported that US News & World Report had stripped the University of Oklahoma of its ranking, citing falsification of alumni giving data. The investigation found that the University had for many years systematically misreported the data in order to garner a higher placement in the rankings and a "Best Colleges" designation (Levenson, 2019).
