Montana State University.

What MSU's own pages say about how cases proceed

Who may be present

For the initial informal meeting with the instructor, MSU's own academic-misconduct guidance states, "It is also acceptable for the student to bring an additional support person with them, should they choose to do so." For a formal hearing before a Conduct Officer or Hearing Board, the Code of Student Conduct defines an Advisor as "a person selected by a student to provide support and advice during a student conduct process," who "may consult privately with the student but may not speak on the student's behalf unless otherwise required by law or as approved as a reasonable accommodation," and who may be "whomever they wish to serve as their advisor, including attorneys, at the student's own expense." Whether a student may personally record a meeting or hearing is not addressed in the sources reviewed; the Code refers only to "a copy of the record of the hearing" being available on appeal, without describing how that record is made. — Code of Student Conduct §110.00, §450.30 (revised May 2026, effective Jul 1, 2026; retrieved Sep 15, 2026) · Conduct Guidelines and Grievance Procedures for Students

What follows on the record

The Code states that upon expulsion or suspension, "the student's grades for the active semester will be recorded as W, upon request" — a registration outcome, not a disciplinary transcript notation. On retention: a student sanctioned to "expulsion, suspension, or eviction will have their entire student conduct record maintained for at least five years, but may be maintained for a longer period at the University's discretion," while "All other student conduct records will be maintained for at least five years from the date of last enrollment, then destroyed." Not stated in the sources reviewed: disclosure of a conduct record to a graduate program, employer, or licensing board, or any notation placed directly on the academic transcript itself. — Code of Student Conduct §470.10, §600.00 (retrieved Sep 15, 2026) · Conduct Guidelines and Grievance Procedures for Students

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

Academic misconduct at MSU is addressed first at the instructional level under the Code of Student Conduct §410.00 (revised May 2026, effective Jul 1, 2026; retrieved Sep 15, 2026). When an instructor suspects a violation, the Code states the instructor shall "provide the student with written notice describing the alleged conduct" and "make a reasonable effort to privately meet with the student to discuss the concern," during which "the student will have an opportunity to respond or explain the circumstances." If the instructor finds a violation occurred, available instructor-level sanctions are "Oral reprimand; Written reprimand; An assignment to repeat the work or an alternate assignment; and/or A lower or failing grade on an assignment, examination, or course," recorded on an Academic Misconduct Notification form sent to the Office of the Dean of Students. No evidentiary standard (such as a preponderance-of-the-evidence rule) is stated anywhere in the Code for this or any other proceeding, and that absence is stated as such rather than assumed.

The Office of the Dean of Students' own process page states what happens for a second or more serious case: "The Office of the Dean of Students determines charges in consultation with the instructor's department. The student may either accept responsibility for the academic misconduct and agree to the proposed sanctions by signing an administrative agreement, or appeal the sanctions, resulting in a University Student Conduct Board hearing." Source: Academic Misconduct @ MSU — Office of the Dean of Students. Appeal from a Hearing Officer or Board decision runs through the Code's own appeals section:

The letter must allege one of two specific grounds — a procedural rights violation, or new evidence unavailable at the original hearing. The Vice President for Student Success then reviews "the record only" and may affirm, overturn, or remand; that decision "is the final decision of the University" at the campus level, with a further appeal available "to the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education under the provisions of Policy 203.5.2 in the Montana Board of Regents Policy and Procedures Manual." Source: Conduct Guidelines and Grievance Procedures for Students §520.00. What any of this means for a particular case is for the institution and its process to determine.

Revision history of this page

2026-09-15 — Page created. First-party material captured from montana.edu: the Center for Faculty Excellence's generative-AI detection page, the eCAT Canvas-help Turnitin pages, the Office of the Dean of Students' Academic Misconduct page, and the Code of Student Conduct (revised May 2026, effective Jul 1, 2026 — current at time of capture, not a stale prior revision). TRANSPORT NOTE: montana.edu returned HTTP 403 to this session's WebFetch tool on every path tried, while a direct curl fetch from this same host succeeded with HTTP 200 on every page cited above — the same host-vs-sandboxed-tool split this collection has already documented for buffalo.edu and hunter.cuny.edu. All montana.edu quotations were captured by direct curl fetch. Two office emails on montana.edu are Cloudflare-obfuscated in the page source (data-cfemail); both were decoded mechanically from the same publicly served HTML (a reversible encoding, not a login gate) to deanofstudents@montana.edu and the Dean of Students' own listed address, and are reproduced here as the addresses the pages themselves publish. Detector sweep: named-vendor sweep (Turnitin, SimCheck, Originality, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus, Examity) and category sweep (Center for Faculty Excellence AI pages, eCAT Canvas-help pages, Dean of Students pages, Code of Student Conduct) found Turnitin's AI-detection feature confirmed in current use; no other vendor returned a first-party hit. NOT DISQUALIFIED: the detector is documented as actively deployed, with a caution against sole reliance rather than a recommendation against use altogether — MSU's own guidance frames a flagged report as a starting point for a conversation, not grounds to disable or avoid the tool. Ombuds/advocacy sweep: no standalone ombudsperson or student-advocate office serving general undergraduates was located on montana.edu; the one "ombudsman" reference found in this review describes a narrow role within the ILEAD distance-education program advising a specific cohort, not a general student resource, and is not presented as one here. Evidentiary-standard absence: no page located in this review — including the full Code of Student Conduct — states a standard of proof (preponderance, clear-and-convincing, or otherwise) for any conduct determination; that gap is stated as the finding rather than assumed to be preponderance by analogy to other institutions. Record row: the Code's only stated transcript-adjacent effect of expulsion or suspension is a "W" grade recorded for the active semester upon request; no separate disciplinary notation on the academic transcript itself is described, and that is recorded as an absence rather than inferred. Recording of a meeting or hearing by the student personally is not addressed; the Code speaks only of an official "record of the hearing" used on appeal, without stating its form. Nothing paraphrase-pending. Archive captures not requested this pass (unattended scheduled run). Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-09-15).

2026-09-17 — Internet Archive captures requested this date by an automated capture pass; no human review is claimed for this entry. No quotation, date, finding or link above was changed by it. Each capture below was requested through Save Page Now and then confirmed to play back. Captures added: Generative AI Detection Tools and If You Suspect a Student is Misusing It - Center for Faculty Excellence | Montana State University → https://web.archive.org/web/20260917145124/https://www.montana.edu/facultyexcellence/ai/ai_teaching/misuse.html; Conduct Guidelines and Grievance Procedures for Students - MSU Policies and Procedures | Montana State University → https://web.archive.org/web/20260917145205/https://www.montana.edu/policy/student_conduct/; Academic Misconduct @ MSU - Office of the Dean of Students | Montana State University → https://web.archive.org/web/20260917145336/https://www.montana.edu/deanofstudents/our-programs/student-conduct/academic-misconduct/. Not captured because the publisher refuses the Archive's fetcher — each of these returns normally to an ordinary browser, so the source is unchanged and only the capture is missing: Turnitin in Canvas - Canvas | Montana State University (HTTP 200 to the Archive).

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