American colleges and universities are built on the idea that higher education is a public right but also a privilege. With knowledge comes responsibility and accountability, and students, faculty members, administrators and counselors are all expected to act in a way that promotes these values. Unfortunately, the integrity of schools’ reputations are compromised after certain individuals act unethically and even illegally. As you complete your online classes, consider the stories of these top 10 con artists in academic history, and remember your commitment to the principles of higher education.

1. Liberato Servo: In one of the greatest college grade scandals of all time, student employees at Diablo Valley College in California were sentenced to jail time and heavy fines. Liberato Servo, considered one of the ringleaders of the swindle, worked as a student employee at the Diablo Valley College records office while he siphoned away $15,000 as he changed grades for other students. The scandal took place over six years and involved many student employees at the records office, involving some 53 defendants in all. Servo was charged with 18 felony counts in November 2007 and ended up serving one year in jail.
2. Adam B. Wheeler: One of the world’s most distinguished, exclusive universities was revealed to be vulnerable to a major admissions scheme led by Harvard senior Adam B. Wheeler. In May 2010, Wheeler pled to 20 counts of fraud and larceny after he was discovered to have falsified letters of recommendations and transcripts which he submitted for the Rhodes and Fulbright Scholarships, among other applications. A Harvard professor on the review board noticed similarities between Wheeler’s Rhodes application and another professor’s application, finding that Wheeler’s pieces were plagiarized. When administrators dug deeper, they found that Wheeler had falsified information on transcripts sent to other colleges, including Yale.
3. Florida State tutors: During the spring of 2009, Florida State was sanctioned by the NCAA after a tutor and instructor wrote papers and gave test answers to student athletes in 2006 and 2006. The scandal involved 61 athletes in 10 different sports, and the case ended up in the Florida Supreme Court after the NCAA punished the school by lowering scholarships and "stripp[ing]" Florida State of all wins that resulted from games played by any guilty students.
4. UVA students and alumni: University of Virginia is one of the oldest public universities in the country, but in 2001, the school had to deal with a serious cheating scandal that exposed a cheating ring of over 120 students. The students were discovered after their physics professor tested out his own software program that was designed to identify instances of plagiarism. He found that 122 students were guilty, prompting a controversial debate over the use of his program and of the academic honesty policy. Current and former students sued the school, seeking "damages in excess of $13 million," according to TheFire.com. UVA attempted to make amendments to the honesty policy, but students rejected the proposal.
5. Heather Bresch: As the governor’s daughter, Heather Bresch was expected to be a credible, responsible business graduate, but she in fact falsified her resume to indicate that she had earned an MBA from West Virginia University. In a con that also included WVU Provost Gerald Lang and the business school dean Steve Sears, it was found that Bresch couldn’t have earned an MBA because she was 22 credits short of graduating. She implied that her work experience made up for the missing credits, but apparently due to pressure from the WVU president, Mike Garrison, the administrators met in October 2008 to grant Bresch a retroactive degree. Today, Heather Bresch is President of the pharmaceutical company Mylan, Inc., and her degree was never rescinded.
6. Richard and Oral Roberts: Oral Roberts University’s own president and founding family were accused of money laundering and fraud in 2007, a demoralizing blow to a conservative Christian university founded in 1963 by evangelist Oral Roberts. President Richard Roberts and Oral Roberts — the son of the school’s founder — apparently took money from the school for personal home remodeling projects and also used university funds — an estimated $26,000 — to pay for his daughter’s senior trip and university employees to do her homework. Roberts — whose wife also went shopping and paid cell phone bills with the stolen money — claimed that he was being blackmailed by professors who complained about the school’s involvement in a Tulsa, OK, mayoral race.
7. Southern University assistant registrar: Louisiana’s Southern University was hit with a major grade-changing scandal in 2004, but the acts allegedly dated back to 1995. Nearly 550 students and former students were investigated after working with a now-fired assistant registrar to change their grades. The university even considered revoking undergraduate and graduate degrees in some cases, and at least one student was discovered to have lied about earning a degree altogether.
8. Benjamin Ladner: In another con involving university presidents siphoning school funds for personal use, American University president Benjamin Ladner took his wife to the Virgin Islands on the university’s dime, along with American University board chair George Collins and his wife. But Collins became annoyed with Ladner — one of the best paid university presidents at the time — after he asked for an extra $5 million on top of his base salary, to be paid over a period of 5 years. Collins convinced the board to hire a lawyer, and Ladner was suspended and then fired in 2005.
9. Fuqua Business School students: When 34 MBA students at Duke’s Fuqua Business School were exposed after cheating on an exam in 2008, the scandal garnered national attention, and many questioned the value and integrity of business schools elsewhere. The students had cheated on a take-home, open-book exam for a core curriculum course, and the guilty ones made up nearly 10% of their entire class. Nine students were expelled, 15 were suspended for one year and failed the class, nine students failed the class, and one student failed the exam.
10. Alexandra Goulding and University of Minnesota tutors: Alexandra Goulding and at least two other tutors at the University of Minnesota confessed to writing papers for members of the men’s basketball team in 1999. Goulding maintained that she helped players type papers and formulate sentences, and did not complete the entire papers without their contributions. Another tutor, however, also worked for the academic counseling unit and admitted to "complet[ing] 400 pieces of course work for 20 players from 1993 to 1998," reported Sports Illustrated. Some tutors received cash for their work, and even implied that coaches indirectly asked them to act unethically so that the players could remain on the team.