Columbus State University.

What CSU's Student Code of Conduct says about how cases proceed

Who may be present

An "Advisor is a person who may attend any portion of the conduct process at the request of a Respondent and Complainant… for the purpose of advising their advisee. The Student may have anyone serve as their Advisor, including an attorney (at the Student's expense)." Recording is not addressed in the general Student Conduct Procedures. — Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027

What follows on the record

Not stated in the sources reviewed. The Code's Academic Misconduct Sanctions, Student Conduct Sanctions, and Sanctioning sections state no transcript-notation, retention, or disclosure provision for an academic-misconduct or conduct case. — Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027

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

From the Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027 (retrieved Oct 20, 2026; no on-page revision date beyond the title): a faculty member who suspects academic misconduct reports it on an Academic Misconduct form; the student is owed "notice of the charge(s) and possible sanctions, and the opportunity for the student to respond," and an instructor's sanction may be appealed to the department chair (or college dean). Separately: "The Office of the Dean of Students, in consultation with the designated Academic Affairs representative, may deem the violation of Academic Misconduct sufficiently severe in and of itself… such that additional student conduct processes are initiated." Those conduct-level cases follow a Minor or Major Violation Resolution Process: a Preliminary Disciplinary Meeting, an investigation where the potential sanction is suspension, expulsion, or program removal, and — if the Respondent disputes responsibility — a hearing before an Administrative Hearing Officer or a Student Conduct Hearing Panel.

The standard of proof is stated twice, consistently: "the standard of proof required is a preponderance of evidence, i.e., the evidence demonstrates that it is more likely than not that the conduct occurred," and, for the hearing itself, "The standard of review for determining whether a policy violation has occurred shall be a Preponderance of the Evidence." As on other pages in this collection where a school publishes two evidentiary standards for different stakes, the Code adds a higher bar for the most severe outcomes: "Any decision to suspend or to expel a student must also be supported by substantial evidence at the hearing." Appeal runs on three grounds — new information not knowable at the time of the hearing, procedural error or bias, or a finding "inconsistent with the weight of the information" — submitted in writing within five business days to the Dean of Students Office, which forwards it to the President or a designee — "The appeal should be a review of the record only, and no new meeting with the Respondent will be conducted" — with discretionary Board of Regents review available after that. Source: Student Code of Conduct 2026–2027. What these quotations mean for any particular case is for the institution and its process to determine; they are reproduced so you can read the originals in context.

Revision history of this page

2026-10-20 — Page created. Priority A tranche 4, entry 282. Cold build (scheduled, unattended); no prior CANDIDATES.md/procedure-facts.json research to reuse. All quotations retrieved this date. Named-vendor sweep (Turnitin and its AI writing indicator specifically, SimCheck, Originality, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus, Examity) found only Turnitin, confirmed first-party as a plagiarism/similarity tool by the Academic Center for Tutoring's Turnitin.com & Plagiarism Policy page and named nowhere as an AI-writing detector. The Student Code of Conduct 2026-2027 names no detection product anywhere in it; its only AI-related text is the academic-misconduct regulation listing "artificial intelligence, machine learning, and similar instances of assistance" as an example of instructor-permitted collaboration. CATEGORY SWEEP: Columbus State's news releases and career-training pages (Generative AI Tools programs, an AI certificate, a Pezold Center for Emergent Technology announcement) and an informal search for a campus teaching-center AI-guidance page found nothing on detection, no recommendation against it, and no statement that one has been disabled. DISQUALIFICATION CHECK: not disqualified. PROCESS-BASED VERIFICATION SWEEP: the same pages plus one additional site search found no institution-published process-based alternative to detector output; none-published at the scope searched. EVIDENTIARY WEIGHT: not applicable — no detector is named for a weight statement to attach to. PROCESS, FROM THE STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT 2026-2027: instructor-level Academic Misconduct Procedures (Academic Misconduct form, due process, appeal to department chair/dean) and, where the Dean of Students escalates a sufficiently severe case, the general Student Conduct Procedures (Minor/Major Violation Resolution Process, Preliminary Disciplinary Meeting, investigation, hearing before an Administrative Hearing Officer or Student Conduct Hearing Panel). EVIDENTIARY STANDARD: preponderance of the evidence stated twice (in the general Standard of Proof section and again for the hearing itself), with a higher "substantial evidence" bar specifically for a suspension or expulsion sanction — two standards reproduced side by side in the same pattern recorded on other pages in this collection (e.g., gatech, albanystate), their interaction not stated on CSU's own pages. One sentence in the Standard of Proof section was not quoted: the Code states the preponderance standard is "often referred to as '50% plus a feather'," but the source PDF's extraction carries an unmatched quotation mark around that phrase (no closing mark before the next sentence), so it is described here in prose rather than reproduced as a quotation, to avoid silently adding or removing punctuation the source itself does not clearly carry. ACCOMPANIMENT: the Code's general Advisor definition (attend any portion of the process, including an attorney, at the student's expense) is quoted; recording of a hearing is addressed only in the Code's separate Sexual Misconduct section (an institution-made audio recording as the official record, with no other recording permitted), which is out of scope for a general academic-misconduct case and not used here. RECORD: no transcript-notation, retention, or third-party-disclosure provision for an academic-misconduct or conduct case was located; the Undergraduate Academic Regulations catalog page separately states, in the unrelated context of Academic Renewal eligibility, that "Scholastic suspensions that occurred in the past shall remain recorded on the student's permanent record" — a general retention statement, not a misconduct-specific rule, and not used as the docket answer. OFFICE: Office of the Dean of Students, 706-507-8730, DOS@columbusstate.edu; no street address is published on the office's own pages reviewed. OMBUDS: no separate ombuds office exists — the Dean of Students' own Services page states "The DOS serves as the student body's ombudsman… assisting students with writing and presenting grievances and appeals," the same office that administers the Student Code of Conduct; CSU does not describe this function as independent or confidential, so it is recorded here exactly as published rather than characterized as a neutral resource. NAMING CARE: Columbus State University (Columbus, Georgia, a University System of Georgia institution) is distinct from Columbus State Community College (Columbus, Ohio), which repeatedly surfaced in searches under the same "Columbus State" short form; none of that college's content was used. TRANSPORT NOTE: plain curl hangs against www.columbusstate.edu entirely — the TLS Client Hello is sent and the host never answers, timing out at the handshake stage on all four sources this page cites (confirmed with curl -v --http1.1, 15s timeout), while a browser fetch and Python's urllib reach the same URLs in under 0.2s with HTTP 200. This is a block on curl's TLS fingerprint specifically, not a client-rendering requirement — every source is ordinary server-rendered HTML or a static PDF. All four sources were therefore fetched in a browser session this date, hashed in-browser with SubtleCrypto, and supplied to capture.py with --supply-file/--supply-sha256; the recipe records each as attended for that reason. FIDELITY CORRECTIONS ON FIRST RUN: two case-only mismatches, both this session's own prose lowercasing a quotation's sentence-initial "The" without a bracket (the Dean of Students escalation sentence and the appeal-review sentence); both corrected to the capitalized source form per FA-D-20260917-01 rather than bracketed, since each sits as a standalone quoted span rather than grammatically inside this page's own sentence. Nothing paraphrase-pending. Traces to tools/packets/columbusstate-packet.txt with zero failures after the corrections above; gated in tools/fidelity-gate.txt. Archive captures pending — not requested this pass (unattended scheduled run). Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-10-20).

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