South Dakota State University.
- Detection status
- Turnitin confirmed for similarity/plagiarism checking, listed under an "Originality Checker" heading; no AI-writing-specific feature or any other AI-text detector is named anywhere on sdstate.edu across a named-vendor and category sweep, and neither of the University's two core conduct policies mentions generative AI at all
- Office in these sources
- Office of Student Affairs (Policy Contact for the Student Conduct Code and for Policy 2:4) · 605-688-5248 · no office-wide email published on either policy's own page
- Ombuds or advocacy office
- Ombuds Office — first-party described as "confidential, neutral, informal and independent," serving "all members of the university community," impartial and not taking sides. Mary Christensen, Ombuds · SDEH 165, 1250 8th St., Brookings, SD 57007 · 605-688-6474 (the office's own page publishes an email contact link but not the address as displayed text). The office's own page does not name academic-integrity allegations specifically among its services. · sdstate.edu/ombuds
- Sources last checked
- Sep 28, 2026
Reproduced from the institution’s own pages quoted below — potentially relevant official sources, not a determination of which one governs any case.
South Dakota State University's published sources on AI detection and academic integrity, quoted and linked below. These are potentially relevant official sources, not a determination of which one governs any case — course syllabi may set additional rules, and Policy 2:4 itself is a separate, earlier-stage process from the formal Student Conduct Code it can escalate into. Confirm applicability with the institution. Any dates are quoted from the sources, not a deadline calculation performed for you.
No AI-writing detector is named as deployed at South Dakota State
Named-vendor sweep (Turnitin, Turnitin AI writing indicator, SimCheck, Originality, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus, Examity) and category sweep (Instructional Design Services' e-learning applications page, the University's AI Guidelines, and both governing policies — Policy 2:4 and the Student Conduct Code) found Turnitin confirmed only for similarity/plagiarism checking, and found no first-party statement that any AI-text detector is enabled or in use.
Instructional Design Services lists Turnitin under an "Originality Checker" heading (retrieved Sep 28, 2026):
Source: E-learning Applications — Instructional Design Services. The University's own AI Guidelines page states plainly that it does not govern classroom use at all: "These guidelines are intended for communications and marketing professionals at SDState. They do not apply to other areas of the university, such as education, classroom settings, IT or chatbots." Source: AI Guidelines — University Marketing & Communications (retrieved Sep 28, 2026). Neither Policy 2:4 (Student Academic Misconduct and Academic Appeals) nor the Student Conduct Code names Turnitin, generative AI, or any detection tool anywhere in their text — checked directly rather than assumed.
What SDSU's own pages say about how cases proceed
- Who may be present
- The Student Conduct Code defines an Advisor as "a person of the Student's choosing who has agreed to advise a Student throughout the Student conduct process. The Advisor may be a Faculty Member, staff member, Student, attorney, family member, or anyone else." The Advisor's role is limited: "not permitted to speak to anyone else, or participate directly in any hearing." Formal hearings are recorded: "The Student Conduct Officer shall record the audio of the hearing," and "No other person may record the hearing." Policy 2:4's own earlier, informal stage — the faculty-student meeting over an alleged violation — does not itself address an advisor right or recording; those provisions belong to the Student Conduct Code, which Policy 2:4 hands a case to if informal resolution fails.
- What follows on the record
- No transcript notation is named. The Student Conduct Code states: "Conduct sanctions shall not be made part of the Respondent's permanent academic record, but shall become part of the Respondent's conduct record." Retention is stated precisely: a conduct record "will be expunged seven (7) years after the date of the original finding of a violation," except that a record involving "suspension, expulsion, revoking admission and/or a degree, or withholding a degree" "shall be maintained permanently." On disclosure, the Code addresses one specific case: "Where restitution is required of a Respondent, the University reserves the right to disclose all portions of the conduct file as may be necessary to obtain a judgment in a court of competent jurisdiction."
The two questions an adviser raises first, answered from this institution’s own published documents — or recorded as not stated in them.
From Policy 2:4 (Student Academic Misconduct and Academic Appeals; revised Feb 20, 2025, clerical; retrieved Sep 28, 2026), on how an academic-misconduct allegation begins:
Where informal resolution is not reached, the matter proceeds under the Student Conduct Code, whose own hearing decision is made "by a preponderance of the evidence (i.e., more likely than not)." Policy 2:4's own appeal path runs from the instructor through the Department Head/School Director, the Dean, and finally the Provost and VP for Academic Affairs, referred to the Academic Appeals Committee:
Source: Policy 2:4 — Student Academic Misconduct and Academic Appeals and Policy 3:1 — Student Conduct Code. What any of this means for a particular case is for the institution and its process to determine.
Where the documents live
| Document | Location |
|---|---|
| Policy 2:4 — Student Academic Misconduct and Academic Appeals | sdstate.edu — Policy 2:4 (revised Feb 20, 2025, clerical; retrieved Sep 28, 2026) |
| Policy 3:1 — Student Conduct Code | sdstate.edu — Policy 3:1 (Interim Policy; Policy Contact: Office of Student Affairs, 605-688-5248; retrieved Sep 28, 2026) |
| E-learning Applications (Turnitin) — Instructional Design Services | sdstate.edu/instructional-design-services/e-learning-applications (retrieved Sep 28, 2026) |
| AI Guidelines — University Marketing & Communications (out of scope for classroom use, by its own terms) | sdstate.edu/university-marketing-communications/ai-guidelines (retrieved Sep 28, 2026) |
| Ombuds Office | sdstate.edu/ombuds · Mary Christensen · SDEH 165, 1250 8th St., Brookings, SD 57007 · 605-688-6474 (retrieved Sep 28, 2026) |
Organizing your own drafts and records to bring to any of this: the records checklist. Capturing the pages above as they read today, and keeping your own dated record beside them: what to do with these sources.
Revision history of this page
2026-09-28 — Page created by a scheduled, unattended build pass. All quotations retrieved this date from sdstate.edu pages linked beside them. Detection-inventory sweep performed: named-vendor sweep (Turnitin, Turnitin AI writing indicator, SimCheck, Originality, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus, Examity) and category sweep (Instructional Design Services' e-learning page, the University's AI Guidelines, Policy 2:4, and the Student Conduct Code) came back empty of any first-party statement that an AI-text detector is deployed; Turnitin is confirmed only under an "Originality Checker" heading, similarity/plagiarism terms only. NOT DISQUALIFIED: empty inventory, not a documented deactivation or recommendation against. NAME COLLISION GUARDED AGAINST: search results for "SDSU" repeatedly surfaced sacd.sdsu.edu, San Diego State University's own student-affairs site, a different institution abbreviated the same way; none of its content was used here, and the slug "sdstate" was chosen instead of "sdsu" specifically to leave that slug free for San Diego State University (currently DEFERRED in this queue), the same collision handling as ohiostate/southcarolina/isu. TRANSPORT NOTE: the historic PDF path for the Student Conduct Code (sdstate.edu/sites/default/files/Student%20Conduct%20Code.pdf) now 302-redirects to the canonical HTML policy page used as this page's source; a plain curl fetch of that PDF path returns an HTML page rather than a PDF or a redirect target, so the HTML policy page was fetched directly instead and is what is cited. PROCESS SOURCE: Policy 2:4's informal faculty-student stage, read together with the Student Conduct Code (Policy 3:1) for the formal hearing rights, preponderance standard, and retention/disclosure provisions that govern a case escalated beyond informal resolution. OFFICE: Policy 3:1's own page lists only a phone number (605-688-5248) and "Office of Student Affairs" as its Policy Contact; no office-wide email is published on either policy's own page, so none is presented here as such (a specific staff email surfaced by an earlier automated summary of the policy's superseded PDF version could not be re-verified against the current HTML policy and is not used). OMBUDS CONFIRMED, STUDENT-ELIGIBLE: the Ombuds Office's own page states it is "confidential, neutral, informal and independent," serving "all members of the university community" — a genuine first-party independence claim, distinct from the faculty/staff-only or housed-within-conduct-office patterns recorded on other pages in this queue. It does not name academic-integrity allegations specifically among its services, recorded as a scope gap rather than assumed either way. Nothing paraphrase-pending. Subreddit demand scan not run (outside this run's research method). Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-09-28).
2026-10-06 — Internet Archive captures requested on 2026-09-28 by an automated capture pass and recorded this date; 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: E-learning Applications — Instructional Design Services → https://web.archive.org/web/20260928122304/https://www.sdstate.edu/instructional-design-services/e-learning-applications; sdstate.edu/ombuds → https://web.archive.org/web/20260928122414/https://www.sdstate.edu/ombuds; Policy 2:4 — Student Academic Misconduct and Academic Appeals → https://web.archive.org/web/20260928122932/https://www.sdstate.edu/university-policies-procedures/policy-24-student-academic-misconduct-academic-appeals; Policy 3:1 — Student Conduct Code → https://web.archive.org/web/20260928123005/https://www.sdstate.edu/university-policies-procedures/policy-31-student-conduct-code.
Spot an error or an outdated quotation? hello@gatheredwork.com — corrections are made on the record, in this log.