.Legal Consequences
Cheating can rise to the level of a legal violation when students steal other people's copyrighted work. For example, a student who lifts excerpts from someone else's paper and then uses them in her own published paper has committed copyright infringement. She could be sued by the creator of the work for any financial damages the creator suffered as a result of the infringement. Most cheating in college does not rise to this level, but it is still a possibility.