Virginia Commonwealth University.

What the university's own documents say about how cases proceed

Who may be present

Both parties have the opportunity to “Be accompanied by an adviser of their choice at their own time and expense during the adjudication process. Advisers are not permitted to speak or participate directly in the adjudication process unless authorized by the administrator or chairperson.” The office's FAQ puts the same right in plainer terms for a hearing: “Respondents may bring an adviser of their choice, such as for moral support, but the adviser is not allowed to participate in the hearing on the respondent's behalf,” and adds that where English is not the respondent's first language “the respondent may ask to bring a translator.” On recording, the Decision Board rules state: “There will be a single verbatim record of the Decision Board hearing, excluding deliberations. The record shall be the property of the university.” No provision permitting a student to make their own recording was located. — Honor System and Standards of Academic Conduct, Rights and Responsibilities; Decision Board procedures; Honor System FAQ (pages dated Apr 21, 2025; retrieved Aug 27, 2026) · Rights and Responsibilities · Decision Board · Frequently Asked Questions

What follows on the record

VCU publishes a page addressed to this question and scoped by heading to the Honor System: under “Honor System and Standards of Academic Conduct” it states “For suspension and expulsion, the transcript notation is permanent,” that “A grade of ‘F' in the course that results from a sanction may not be voided in any way, including by withdrawal from a course or from VCU, use of the Historical Repeat Course Option, or through the Grade Appeal Procedure,” and that “Respondents may apply to the Senior Vice Provost for Student Affairs, or designee, to have any transcript notation period reduced due to compelling mitigating circumstances. With the exception of expulsion.” The integrity office's FAQ gives the criteria it applies: “Examples include academic achievement, no additional misconduct, demonstration of remorse and/or lessons learned, and letters of support from a program or faculty.” On disclosure the same transcript page warns, in its sexual-misconduct section rather than its Honor System section, that a student with an expunged record “may still need to disclose information about their disciplinary history to third parties, including potential employers, other universities' admissions offices, a professional board, etc.”; no equivalent sentence scoped to academic misconduct was located, and no retention period for Honor System records was located on the pages reviewed. — Transcript Notations: Amendment and Expungement, Dean of Student Advocacy Office (page dated Nov 7, 2024; retrieved Aug 27, 2026); Honor System FAQ (page dated Apr 21, 2025; retrieved Aug 27, 2026) · Transcript Notations · Frequently Asked Questions

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

VCU's standard of proof is higher than the preponderance standard most institutions on this site publish. Its Honor System pages state it twice, once as a rule and once as a definition (pages dated Apr 21, 2025; retrieved Aug 27, 2026):

Sources: Filing Charges and Adjudication and Standard of Evidence, which attributes the definition to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia's Domicile Guidelines of Oct 25, 2016.

On the route a report takes, the policy pages state (retrieved Aug 27, 2026):

Source: Standard Referral — Referral, Review, Investigation, and Resolution (page dated Apr 21, 2025). The five-day figure is quoted from the source, not a deadline calculation performed for you.

Three further first-party points a reader is unlikely to find alone. First, the instructor is told to grade as though nothing had happened while the matter is open: “Pending resolution of the matter under this policy, the specific assignment and remaining assignments must be administered, assessed or graded as if no violation of the Honor System and Standards of Academic Conduct has occurred and in accordance with relevant academic policies.” Source: Rights and Responsibilities. Second, VCU splits review into two separate paths and its FAQ says a respondent cannot take both at once: a Decision Board hears “A challenge to the finding of responsibility,” while “Sanction Review Boards, however, consider sanctions only when responsibility is no longer disputed,” and “Sanction Review Boards do not meet with a respondent in person. Instead, the board considers only written evidence.” Third, a Decision Board deliberates in closed session and “Establishing the respondent violated the Honor System and Standards of Academic Conduct requires the majority vote of at least two of the three voting members of the Decision Board.” Sources: Decision Board and Frequently Asked Questions.

Located but not captured as text, and so carried here as paraphrase pending verification: the consolidated Honor System and Standards of Academic Conduct policy document, which every conduct page links at its head, is served from VCU's DocTract policy portal and returned a browser-compatibility notice rather than the policy when fetched. The section-by-section pages quoted above are VCU's own rendering of that document and are what this page relies on. Two of those pages, the Honor System Sanctions page and its Records subpage, returned empty bodies on repeated fetches this date, which is why the sanction schedule and any Honor System retention period are not stated here. The FAQ also notes that some programs add their own standards on top: certain academic programs “have technical or professional standards that govern the conduct of students in those programs” and “may take additional action if a student is found responsible.” What any of this means for a particular case is for the institution and its process to determine.

Revision history of this page

2026-08-27 — Page created. Every quotation on this page was captured first-party this date from the vcu.edu addresses linked beside it. Source page dates as displayed: the conduct pages all carry Apr 21, 2025; the CTLE guidelines state “Updated October 10, 2024” with a site footer date of Mar 11, 2026, and both are given rather than one; Learning Systems pages carry Jun 24, 2025 (Turnitin), Apr 8, 2025 (Interpreting a Score), Mar 27, 2025 (faculty FAQ), Feb 27, 2025 (Respondus) and Apr 14, 2026 (Canvas 3rd Party Tools); the transcript-notation page carries Nov 7, 2024; the ombuds student-services page Nov 4, 2025; the Libraries guide Apr 14, 2026; the AI Guidebook Jul 8, 2026; the Bulletin is the 2026-27 edition.

2026-08-27 — Detection sweep recorded. Named-vendor sweep on vcu.edu: Turnitin, including its AI writing indicator, SimCheck and Originality product names; Copyleaks; iThenticate; GPTZero; Originality.ai; Winston AI; Crossplag; ZeroGPT; Packback; Grammarly Authorship; Honorlock; Proctorio; Respondus; Examity. Category sweep: the Canvas third-party tool catalogue and integration-request process run by Learning Systems; the Instructional Tools list; the AI Guidebook's enterprise-licensed tool list; the CTLE's faculty and student Gen AI guidelines and the Office of the CIO's AI pages linked from them; VCU Libraries' generative-AI research guide; the whole Student Conduct and Academic Integrity site; and the graduate thesis and dissertation pathway. Found documented in institutional use: Turnitin, described by VCU only as plagiarism and similarity detection, and Respondus LockDown Browser with Monitor, licensed at no cost to all faculty, staff and students and described by VCU as webcam video analytics. Came back empty on vcu.edu in this review: Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Examity, and any separate graduate text-matching pipeline. Two catalogues could not be read and are recorded as gaps rather than negatives: the Canvas third-party tool table renders through a script and returned template placeholders, and the VCU RightAnswers IT knowledge base returns no article list to a signed-out reader. Both were named in the run's tipoff as places to look; neither could be inspected from this environment, and neither is reported as either confirming or excluding anything.

2026-08-27 — Step-2 disqualification check: pass, and the reasoning is worth stating because this is a close case. The inventory is not empty — Turnitin runs in Canvas and Respondus Monitor is licensed campus-wide — and nothing VCU publishes disables a detector or directs faculty not to use one. The CTLE's “the accuracy of tools that purportedly detect GenAI use is not guaranteed” is a caution about reliability, not a status; the same page's FERPA sentence contemplates VCU holding a contract with a detection-tool provider, so it restricts how such a tool may be fed rather than forbidding one. The distinguishing feature of this school, and the reason the docket line reads as it does, is that VCU documents a similarity pipeline and publishes no statement either enabling or disabling AI-writing detection. That absence is the finding.

2026-08-27 — Findings recorded, not resolved. (1) The consolidated Honor System policy is served from VCU's DocTract portal, which returned a browser-compatibility notice instead of the document; the page therefore relies on VCU's own section-by-section rendering of the same policy on conduct.students.vcu.edu, and the portal link is carried in the source map with that gap stated. Paraphrase pending verification: nothing on this page is drawn from the portal document. (2) The Honor System Sanctions page and its Records subpage returned empty bodies on repeated fetches this date, so the sanction schedule and any Honor System record-retention period are absent here. A retention figure of seven years circulates in search summaries, but the only text located for it belongs to the Student Code of Conduct, which is the non-academic policy, so it was deliberately not carried onto an academic-integrity page. This is the first thing to re-check on the next pass. (3) The transcript-notation page is published by the Dean of Student Advocacy Office rather than by the integrity office, and its Honor System provisions sit under their own heading; only that section is quoted, and the disclosure-to-third-parties sentence is attributed to the sexual-misconduct section it actually appears in rather than borrowed silently. (4) The ombuds office reports to Faculty Affairs, but publishes a student-services page in its own voice describing itself as a resource for VCU students and naming academic integrity issues first among its areas, so it is listed for this page's reader on that basis. An Office of Student Advocacy also exists at advocacy.vcu.edu; its pages were not captured this date and it is not carried here.

2026-08-27 — Deliberate omissions. Turnitin's own guides, help centre, blog and educator network, all linked from VCU's faculty page, are vendor material and are not quoted or relied on; the same goes for the Respondus support site. VCU's Student Code of Conduct pages are the non-academic track and are not used, to avoid importing a rule from the wrong policy. The CTLE's suggested syllabus statement is quoted only for what the document says about its own standing, not as a rule. No lawsuit, news story or third-party detector tracker is referenced. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-08-27). Internet Archive captures: to be added.

2026-08-29 — Sources re-fetched and compared this date; an automated source re-verification, not a human editorial review. All twenty first-party sources linked here were fetched again and compared against the page: the three Turnitin instructional-tools pages (updated 06/24/2025, 04/08/2025, 03/27/2025), the Respondus LockDown Browser and Monitor page (02/27/2025), the Provost GenAI teaching-guidelines page (Updated October 10, 2024) and the Library AI guide (Apr 14, 2026); the Honor System sections on filing, standard of evidence, rights, referral, decision board, FAQ and transcript notations (all 04/21/2025, notations 11/07/2024); and the Canvas third-party-tools page, AI Guidebook, Bulletin and Ombudsperson pages. All quotations still verbatim and all stated dates intact; the consolidated-policy DocTract portal remains unreachable exactly as the page discloses. Detection sweep re-run: no net-new detector and no status change — Turnitin remains documented for similarity only with no VCU page naming an AI-writing indicator, Respondus Monitor remains licensed to all, and the CTLE accuracy caution and FERPA restriction are unchanged. Student Conduct and Ombudsperson contacts confirmed unchanged. Internet Archive captures were requested this date but the Save Page Now endpoint was unavailable from this environment; captures remain to be added. Automated research pass.

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