Sam Houston State University.

What SHSU's own pages say about how cases proceed

Who may be present

"The student may have an advisor or counsel present during the hearing, at the student's expense. The University is not responsible for providing an advisor or counsel." — Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027, §3.05.B.3, "Student's Advisor" (retrieved Sep 1, 2026). This provision governs the Student Disciplinary Hearing Committee, the secondary track described in the lede above — APS 810213's own instructor-initiated track states no advisor or note-taker provision of its own · Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027 (PDF)

What follows on the record

"The University may place disciplinary notations on a student's transcript in accordance with TSUS policy, University policy, and applicable law. The duration and removal of any notation shall be governed by applicable institutional records and transcript practices." — Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027, §3.03.I, "Transcript Notation" (retrieved Sep 1, 2026). No retention period or disclosure-to-third-party provision (graduate programs, employers, licensing boards) was located anywhere in this document; that absence is stated rather than assumed · Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027 (PDF)

The two questions an adviser raises first, answered from this institution's own published documents — or recorded as not stated in them.

APS 810213's own procedure (§3, "Procedures") is entirely instructor-driven at its first stage: an instructor who finds academic dishonesty "may assign an academic penalty," must give the student "written notice (preferably using the Academic Honesty Violation Form) of the offense, the penalty, and the student's right to appeal before enacting the penalty," and the penalty "shall then take effect immediately." If the student appeals, the policy sets a fixed chain — department chair, then academic dean, then the Provost and Sr. Vice President for Academic Affairs — with ten (10) working days at each stage for the student to appeal and ten (10) working days for the reviewing administrator to decide; if a student does not appeal onward, the last decision becomes final on the eleventh working day, and "the decision of the Provost on the matter is final." The policy states no evidentiary standard for this track. Separately, §3.02 lets the Provost refer "flagrant or repeated" violations to the Dean of Students for further disciplinary action "independent of any academic penalty imposed," and it is that referral that brings a case into the Student Code of Conduct process quoted in the block above.

Within that Code of Conduct process, the "3.02 - Disciplinary Procedures" section confirms the standard: "determine if a violation occurred based on a preponderance of evidence standard," and again for the formal hearing, "The Committee's determination shall be based on the preponderance of the evidence." Two further provisions are worth noting even though they were not hoisted into the docket rows above: "Students cannot be compelled to testify against themselves" (§3.05.B.14, Right Against Self-Incrimination), and the hearing itself — "excluding the Committee's deliberations, will be recorded by the Committee," with "a free electronic copy of the recording" available to the student on request (§3.05.B.8). Appeals from a Student Disciplinary Hearing Committee decision go to the Vice President for Student Affairs on four limited grounds — procedural error, disproportionate sanction, new evidence, or a decision not supported by a preponderance of the evidence — and, per the Code, "The VPSA's or designee's decision is final."

Sources: Academic Policy Statement 810213 — Academic Honesty (PDF); Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027 (PDF). A related policy, Academic Policy Statement 900823 ("Academic Grievance Procedures for Students," reviewed Feb 28, 2022), explicitly excludes academic dishonesty from its own scope — "Course grades, except cases of academic dishonesty (see Academic Policy Statement 810213...)" — and was therefore not used for either row above; it is listed in the source map for the scope line itself. What any of this means for a particular case is for the institution and its process to determine.

Revision history of this page

2026-09-01 — Page created. First-party captures: Academic Policy Statement 810213 (reviewed Jun 5, 2024; approved Jun 12, 2024), Academic Policy Statement 900823 (reviewed Feb 28, 2022, used only to confirm its own scope excludes academic dishonesty), the Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027 (full 33-page PDF read for §§1, 3.01–3.05, and the appeal process), the SHSU Online Faculty Development Services page (no on-page date), the SHSU Library's Plagiarism guide (updated Mar 10, 2026) and its "AI Detection Tools DON'T WORK" guide (updated Aug 28, 2026), the Teaching & Learning Center Resources page, the Dean of Students' Office landing page, the University Ombuds "about" page, Student Legal & Mediation Services, and the Testing Center's Proctor Services page. Detection sweep: named-vendor sweep (Turnitin, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus, Examity) run against shsu.edu and shsulibraryguides.org; only Turnitin and Respondus-family/ProctorFree references were found, the latter only in stale 2014/2018 SHSU Online articles that no longer resolve live. Category sweep: LMS (Blackboard, confirmed current), graduate/thesis pipeline (SHSU Graduate and Professional School Theses & Dissertations pages — no detector named, absence stated), proctoring/exam-integrity stack (current vendor not confirmed live — see section 01), IT service catalogue (the IT@Sam products and tech-tutorial pages returned HTTP 404 on every URL tried this session and could not be used). PARAPHRASE-PENDING: one. Section 01's account of the 2023 Turnitin AI-writing-indicator article is paraphrase, not verbatim quotation, because the live page is gone (301-redirects to the SHSU Online section front page) and the only text of it available is an Internet Archive capture from Dec 6, 2024 — a page this project's own fidelity checker treats as outside the corpus it verifies (web.archive.org is excluded from capture by design, the same way fieldassembly.net and gatheredwork.com are). Every other quotation on this page traces to a directly fetched live source. DELIBERATE OMISSIONS: a page describing SHSU's generative-AI guidance for faculty, previously indexed at a public shsu.edu academic-affairs address, returned HTTP 404 on every path variation tried; the Teaching & Learning Center's own page states the current version is intranet-only, so it was not used as a source and that gap is stated in section 01 rather than filled from a search engine's cached summary of the dead page. Two potential ombuds/advocacy resources were identified and excluded with reasons stated in the source map: the University Ombuds Office (its own "about" page states it is for "all faculty and staff members," with no mention of students or academic-integrity matters) and Student Legal & Mediation Services (its own page lists "housing issues, powers of attorney, criminal law, business start-ups, background reports, employment issues, notary services, and more" with no mention of conduct or academic-integrity matters). No transcript-retention period or third-party-disclosure provision was located anywhere in the Student Code of Conduct; stated as an absence in section 02. Internet Archive captures for this page's own sources: to be added, apart from the one pre-existing 2024 capture linked above, which predates this page and was located rather than newly requested. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter.

Spot an error or an outdated quotation? hello@gatheredwork.com — corrections are made on the record, in this log.