University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

What UTRGV's own documents say about how cases proceed

Who may be present

"Each party shall have the right to appear, make an opening and closing statement, present testimony of witnesses and documentary evidence, cross-examine witnesses (as permitted by the Hearing Officer), and be assisted by an advisor of choice. The advisor may be an attorney." The same section adds what happens to the record of the hearing: "The hearing will be audio recorded. The official record will consist of the audio recording of the hearing, the documents received in evidence, any investigation report and supporting evidence, and the decision of the Hearing Officer(s)." Scope worth stating: both provisions are in the hearing procedures at Section D.8.e, which STU 02-100 applies where suspension, an academic sanction or expulsion is proposed and the student disputes the facts. The earlier faculty-disposition stage at Section D.6 — where a faculty member "make[s] an attempt to meet with the student to resolve the matter" — names no advisor, support person or recording right, and that silence is recorded rather than filled in. The policy also limits the advisor's role: "An advisor may confer with and advise the Dean or Respondent, but shall not be permitted to question witnesses, introduce evidence, make objections, or present argument to the Hearing Officer(s)." — HOP STU 02-100, Student Code of Conduct, Sections D.6 and D.8.e (originated 09/01/2015; policy states "December 17, 2025 – Reviewed and amended"; retrieved Aug 26, 2026) · HOP STU 02-100 (PDF)

What follows on the record

"The academic transcript of a student suspended or expelled for disciplinary reasons (not academic or financial) shall be marked with 'Disciplinary Suspension' or 'Disciplinary Expulsion' or 'Bar from Readmission' as appropriate. A notation should state whether and when the student is eligible to reenroll." On removal and on retention, the same section states: "If the student becomes eligible to reenroll at UTRGV and UTRGV determines that good cause exists to remove the disciplinary notation from the student's academic transcript, the notation may be removed upon the written request of the student to the Dean," and "UTRGV will maintain a permanent written disciplinary record for every student assessed a sanction of suspension, expulsion, denial or revocation of degree, or withdrawal of diploma. All other disciplinary records shall be maintained in accordance with university record retention policies, unless the record is permanent in conjunction with the above stated sanctions in this section." On disclosure, the policy states the record "shall be treated as confidential, and the record shall not be accessible to anyone other than the Dean or UTRGV officials with legitimate educational interests, except upon written authorization of the student or in accordance with applicable state or federal laws or court order or subpoena." Recorded as an absence: no provision naming graduate programs, employers or licensing boards as recipients was located in STU 02-100 or on the Student Rights and Responsibilities pages. — HOP STU 02-100, Section D.11, Transcript Notations and Disciplinary Record (policy states "December 17, 2025 – Reviewed and amended"; retrieved Aug 26, 2026) · HOP STU 02-100 (PDF)

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

How an academic-misconduct case starts. STU 02-100 gives academic misconduct its own route before any hearing (retrieved Aug 26, 2026):

Source: HOP STU 02-100 (PDF), Section D.6. The policy defines an "Academic Sanction" as "A sanction affecting a student's grade, such as the lowering of a grade," and Section D.7 splits cases by what is proposed: where the proposed sanction is suspension, an academic sanction or expulsion, "the charges shall be heard and determined by a fair and impartial Hearing Officer in accordance with Section D.8 of this Policy, unless the Respondent has elected an Administrative Disposition." Where none of those is proposed, Section D.7.b describes a lighter process in which the Dean informs the student in writing "of the charges, evidence, proposed findings, and the proposed sanction(s)" and "allows the student an opportunity to meet with the Dean to provide evidence."

On the standard of proof and on notice, the policy states (retrieved Aug 26, 2026):

Source: HOP STU 02-100 (PDF), Sections D.7.c and D.8.b–d. Note that UTRGV's phrasing is "the greater weight of the credible evidence" rather than the "preponderance" formula many institutions use; the wording is reproduced as published and not translated.

On appeals, the policy states (retrieved Aug 26, 2026):

Source: HOP STU 02-100 (PDF), Section D.10. The policy also states how the clock is counted for those windows — "the date that an appealing party has been notified of the sanction or the date of the appealing party received a copy of the Hearing Officer's decision is 3 days after the date the document was sent by mail to the recipient or, if emailed to the recipient, the day the email was sent. If notices are sent via both mail and email, the timeline followed will be that of the email notification" — and that the Dean may withhold "the issuance of an official transcript, grade, diploma, certificate, or degree" pending resolution. Those dates are quoted from the policy, not a deadline calculation performed for you.

Located but not captured as quotation: UTRGV publishes a Faculty Referral / Faculty Disposition Form as a PDF and routes contested reports through the Vaqueros Report It Academic Misconduct Form, which is a hosted reporting portal; the form's own text was not captured in this review and nothing is attributed to it here. What any of this means for a particular case is for the institution and its process to determine.

Revision history of this page

2026-08-26 — Page created. Every quotation on this page was captured first-party this date from the utrgv.edu and support.utrgv.edu addresses linked beside it; nothing is paraphrase-pending. HOP STU 02-100 was downloaded as a PDF and read end to end as text, and its own section lettering is what this page cites. Source dates as displayed: STU 02-100 carries "Originated: 09/01/2015" in its running header and a Dates Reviewed or Amended section listing May 13, 2022, June 6, 2022 and December 17, 2025; the Knowledge Base articles carry machine-readable published and modified dates, reproduced above; the Student Rights and Responsibilities pages and the COLTT Procedures page display no date of their own, which is stated beside them rather than glossed.

2026-08-26 — Detection sweep recorded. Named-vendor sweep, run against the UTRGV Knowledge Base search and the wider utrgv.edu domain: Turnitin and its SimCheck and Originality product names, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus and Examity. Category sweep: the Brightspace third-party integration catalogue read in full, the COLTT Procedures page, the proctoring and exam-integrity articles, the Student Rights and Responsibilities pages and forms index, HOP STU 02-100 end to end, and a search for a graduate thesis or dissertation text-matching pipeline. Found in institutional use: Turnitin including AI writing detection, Respondus LockDown Browser with Respondus Monitor and Live Proctoring over Zoom, Respondus 4.0 Test Generator, and Packback. Came back empty: Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Examity, SimCheck and Turnitin Originality, and any separate graduate-writing detection pipeline. Two sweep terms returned nominal Knowledge Base hits that on inspection matched the ordinary words "originality" and "AI" rather than the vendors Originality.ai and Winston AI, and are recorded as empty for that reason.

2026-08-26 — Step-2 disqualification check: clear pass. No UTRGV page located in this review disables AI detection or recommends against it. The caution UTRGV publishes is a limit on how the output may be used — "Turnitin's analysis should not be used as the sole determinant of academic misconduct" — published in the institution's own IT knowledge base, while the tool itself remains listed among the integrations approved for Brightspace. Recorded as a structural finding rather than smoothed over: that caution appears only in COLTT's instructor-facing IT documentation, and no equivalent sentence was located in HOP STU 02-100 or on the Student Rights and Responsibilities pages, so the strongest published limit on detector evidence at UTRGV sits outside the governing policy.

2026-08-26 — Ombuds trap, worked and recorded. A search for "UTRGV ombuds" surfaces an Office of the Faculty Ombuds with a full set of pages, which is exactly the first of the three traps this method warns about. Its own About page was fetched and read before anything was written: it defines the role as one who "listens to complaints or concerns of faculty," and the office's title, email address and every page in its navigation are faculty-scoped. No student ombuds, student advocate, or independent student-advocacy office for academic-integrity matters was located on utrgv.edu in this review. Two nearby offices were checked and excluded for scope: the Office for Victim Advocacy and Violence Prevention, which addresses interpersonal violence rather than academic integrity, and Student Rights and Responsibilities itself, which sits inside the Office of the Dean of Students — the office that administers student discipline — and is therefore recorded in the office row rather than as an independent resource.

2026-08-26 — Findings recorded, not resolved. (1) SCOPE SPLIT on who may be present: STU 02-100 grants an advisor of choice, who may be an attorney, and provides that the hearing will be audio recorded, but both provisions live in the Section D.8.e hearing procedures. The faculty-disposition stage at Section D.6, which is where an AI-detection allegation is most likely to begin and where a signed form waives the hearing and appeal procedures altogether, names no advisor, support person or recording right. The procedure row states both halves. (2) The policy states its standard as "the greater weight of the credible evidence" rather than "preponderance"; reproduced as published. (3) An address discrepancy is reproduced rather than reconciled: a search summary reported a Brownsville number of 956-882-8292 for Student Rights and Responsibilities, while every SRR page fetched this date publishes 956-882-5411; the page uses the number the office publishes on its own pages. (4) The Knowledge Base AI article links a UTRGV-hosted PDF, "Guide for Approaching AI-Generated Text," at utrgv.edu/online/_files/documents/teaching/ai-generated-text-guide.pdf; that address returned an HTML error document rather than a PDF when fetched this date, so the guide is neither quoted nor linked here. It is the highest-value open item for the next review of this page.

2026-08-26 — Deliberate omissions. The vendor guides Turnitin hosts, which the Knowledge Base article links as additional resources, are third-party and are not quoted; only UTRGV's own words appear above. The Faculty Referral / Faculty Disposition Form PDF and the Maxient-hosted Vaqueros Report It reporting forms are transactional documents and portals and were not opened. The UTRGV Software Directory behind the my.utrgv.edu login was not reached, and no claim rests on it. A Pressbooks chapter on academic integrity hosted at pressbooks.utrgv.edu was located but is course material rather than policy or IT documentation, and nothing from it appears here. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-08-26). Internet Archive captures: to be added.

2026-08-28 — Sources re-fetched and compared this date. All nine linked sources were retrieved and checked against the quotations above: the COLTT Knowledge Base article "AI Writing Detection in Turnitin" (still published Feb 28, 2025, modified Jul 17, 2025), the Third-Party Integrations catalogue (still modified May 19, 2026, still listing "Turnitin (Plagiarism detection)," Respondus LockDown Browser, Respondus 4.0 Test Generator and Packback), the Live Proctoring article (still published and modified Jan 28, 2026), HOP STU 02-100 (downloaded and read end to end; still originated 09/01/2015 with a Dates Reviewed or Amended section of May 13, 2022, June 6, 2022 and December 17, 2025), the COLTT Procedures page (the Respondus Monitor five-year retention quotation intact), the Academic Dishonesty page ("Utilizing AI without authorization and/or citation" and the AI-use advisory intact), the Academic Integrity and Forms and Policies pages, and the Office of the Faculty Ombuds About page (role definition, Cynthia Paccacerqua, phone and email unchanged). Every quotation remained verbatim and every source date unchanged; no page was revised. Office contacts in the docket and source map re-confirmed against the Student Rights and Responsibilities pages — BSTUN 1.20 | EUCTR 315; Brownsville 956-882-5411; Edinburg 956-665-5375; srr@utrgv.edu.

2026-08-28 — Detection sweep re-run; no change. The Brightspace Third-Party Integrations catalogue was re-read in full and still names only Turnitin (plagiarism detection), Respondus and Packback among the relevant tools; the named-vendor sweep (Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Examity, and Turnitin's SimCheck and Originality product names) again came back empty, and no separate graduate thesis or dissertation text-matching pipeline was located. Step-2 disqualification check: clear pass, unchanged — the not-sole-determinant caution remains in COLTT's IT knowledge base while the tool remains listed among the integrations approved for Brightspace.

2026-08-28 — Open items carried forward. The UTRGV-hosted "Guide for Approaching AI-Generated Text" PDF (linked from the Knowledge Base AI article) again returned a Page Not Found response this date and is neither quoted nor linked; it remains the highest-value open item for the next review. Internet Archive captures still pending: Save Page Now was blocked from this run environment this date, so no capture URLs could be recorded.

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