How often do scientists fabricate data?

Depends on what you define as "fabrication". Most scientists tweak things around to suit theories to look like facts, rather than deriving theories from facts. Winning the Games Scientists Play is a nice book [1] delves into this issue in some detail.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Games-Scientists-Play-Sinderma...

Am I so far away from reality or are these people? I can't believe these numbers are so small. I don't have strong evidence, but the situation at my university looks more like 99% of students cheated on a regular basis (actually students who don't cheat are considered stupid). Like students of one semester copy the exam questions and hand them to the next year's candidates. Or papers are copied & pasted from Wikipedia and the likes and data used is pretty much all made up by the writer. I never did or know anybody who did it, but I think it is also common practice to pay others to do your university work.

And the same with teachers. It is quite normal (meaning it happens everyday and everybody does it, not in a sense of "it should be like that" normal) that university government uses their funds to help their friends abroad (there are even news articles about it, but nobody does anything against it), that teaching professors use their funds to pay students to produce software and other products to sell in the teacher's private companies and then hide that work as "science". 99% teachers and students don't do real science.

I can believe that the numbers are lower in other schools, that I somehow managed to get in one of the worst, most fucked up schools on this planet. But even then the difference can't be that big. If you really believe, there are less then 2 out of 3 people being involved in day to day cheating and corruption, then I believe you must be blind. It's human nature, we are talking about.

From my point of view it is so common, that you are really stupid to just follow the artificial rules you read in rule & ethics books. Maybe science in it's purest is about discovering truth. But human daily life is pretty much not about it. It's about the relations you have and the "public face" you can (artificially) create.

(Yes, I once was one of the fighters of true good. But if the whole world around you is "cheating" you can't get anywhere. You know, teachers even fail your exams, if they want to. And if you fight for the "good", nobody comes to give you a high five. They just think you are stupid for not following the real rules or just not being able to graduate normally.)

~2% of scientists admit to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...