Towson University.

What Towson's own pages say about how cases proceed

Who may be present

"The Responding Party may be accompanied by a Support Person." A Support Person "is someone who provides support, guidance, and/or advice to the individual. However, a Support Person cannot speak on behalf of the individual, directly participate in the proceedings, or submit any written requests (including appeals) on behalf of the individual." Recording is the institution's own act, not the student's choice: "The Hearing will be audio recorded." — Code of Student Accountability (updated August 16, 2025; retrieved Sep 3, 2026) · Code of Student Accountability

What follows on the record

For a first academic-integrity offense: "the letter describing the incident and recording the decision will be kept for seven years in the Office of Student Accountability & Restorative Practices... The first-offense file is an internal record, not part of the student's disciplinary record or of the academic transcript." — Student Academic Integrity Policy, TU 03-01.00 (approved 11/26/2001; amended 9/10/2014; retrieved Sep 3, 2026) · TU 03-01.00. For a case that reaches SARP formally: "SARP retains information associated with the investigation, Accountability Resolution Meeting, Hearing, and/or Appeal for seven (7) years," and federal regulations "prohibit disclosing the outcome of accountability proceedings to anyone other than to the Responding Party and to appropriate University personnel" — Code of Student Accountability (updated August 16, 2025; retrieved Sep 3, 2026) · Code of Student Accountability

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 Academic Integrity Policy, TU 03-01.00 (approved 11/26/2001; effective 7/1/2001; amended 5/1/2006 and 9/10/2014; retrieved Sep 3, 2026), on a course-related violation:

Source: TU 03-01.00. This policy itself does not name an evidentiary standard for a course-related case (it uses the phrase "preponderance of evidence" only once, and only for identifying which member of a group is responsible on a group project). The separate Code of Student Accountability, which governs a case that proceeds to a formal SARP hearing — a second offense, or certain non course-related violations — does name one explicitly (updated August 16, 2025; retrieved Sep 3, 2026):

Source: Code of Student Accountability. Sanctions for a first course-related offense range from revision of the work through an "F" for the assignment or the course, plus a university-assigned educational task; a second violation "will normally result in formal disciplinary charges," which can add suspension or expulsion under the Code. Not stated in the sources reviewed: a right to remain silent is not named as such anywhere in the Code's due-process list, though the Code also does not state that a student is compelled to make a statement. Disclosure of a finding to a graduate program, employer, or licensing board beyond the academic transcript itself was searched for (the Code's disciplinary-records section, the Registrar's pages, the Graduate School's thesis and dissertation guidelines) and not found beyond the FERPA-scoped exceptions quoted above. What any of this means for a particular case is for the institution and its process to determine.

Revision history of this page

2026-09-03 — Page created. All quotations retrieved this date from the towson.edu and techhelp.towson.edu pages linked beside them, first-party and captured directly as text; nothing on this page is paraphrase-pending. Source pages carried their own dates as noted beside each quotation: TU 03-01.00 shows approval 11/26/2001, effective 7/1/2001, and amendments 5/1/2006 and 9/10/2014; the Code of Student Accountability shows "Updated August 16, 2025"; the Blackboard Student Assignments PDF shows "© 2019" and "Date made accessible 10/2/2019"; the Mass Communication academic-integrity policy shows "Approved by MCOM Faculty, Dec. 8, 2023"; the College of Graduate Studies Thesis and Dissertation Guidelines show "Updated March 2026." The Information for Support Persons, Faculty & Staff Resources, SARP home and staff pages, Student Outreach & Support page, the two TechHelp SafeAssign/Integrations articles, the Generative AI Resources for Faculty page, the Required Policies for Course Syllabi page, the FCSM appeal-procedures page, and the ADS Testing Center page display no on-page date and are recorded as retrieved this date only.

2026-09-03 — Detection sweep recorded here. Named-vendor sweep: Turnitin's AI writing indicator, SimCheck, Originality, Copyleaks, iThenticate, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Winston AI, Crossplag, ZeroGPT, Packback, Grammarly Authorship, Honorlock, Proctorio, Respondus, and Examity — none confirmed deployed as an AI-text detector. Category sweep: Towson's LMS is Blackboard (confirmed via blackboard.towson.edu and FACET's own AI-resources page); TechHelp's current "Blackboard Integrations" article, which states it lists "all current Blackboard integrations," names no Turnitin product and no AI-text detector, and lists Packback as available only to the Economics department and described only as "an online discussion and writing platform for students," not framed as detection. SafeAssign, Blackboard's native plagiarism-similarity tool, is confirmed deployed (a 2019 OTS training PDF and a current TechHelp instructor article), described by Towson only in terms of a "plagiarism matching score" against a text database, not as AI-writing detection. FACET's Generative AI Resources for Faculty page names no detection tool in either direction and states AI tools "have also been shown to hallucinate sources." The Required Policies for Course Syllabi page carries no AI-specific language. The College of Graduate Studies' Thesis and Dissertation Guidelines (updated March 2026) cross-reference TU 03-01.00 for plagiarized, falsified, or fabricated work and name no plagiarism-check or AI-detection submission requirement. The ADS Testing Center's own description of exam security names camera systems and LanSchool (in-person, classroom-management monitoring) and no remote AI-proctoring vendor. Two department-level pages were located and read in full: Mass Communication's academic-integrity policy (approved Dec. 8, 2023), which states that "passing off materials generated by artificial intelligence (AI) technology constitutes plagiarism" but names no detection tool, and FCSM's Academic Integrity Violation Appeal Procedures, which states its procedures are "direct applications of TU 03-01.00" and names no detection tool. Deliberate omission: general web search results describing Blackboard SafeAssign's plagiarism-detection function in the abstract (third-party help documentation, not towson.edu) were used only to identify what to search for on Towson's own pages, and nothing from them is cited above as a Towson statement.

2026-09-03 — Ombuds sweep recorded here. Searched: "ombudsperson," "ombudsman," and "student advocacy" across towson.edu. No office titled ombudsperson or ombudsman serving students generally was located; the only "ombudsman" results found concern a Baltimore County aging-services volunteer program and a prior staff member's role at a different institution, neither of which is a current Towson office. Student Outreach & Support (SOS), within the Division of Student Affairs, was located and read in full: its own mission statement describes helping students "navigate the university's processes across a wide range of departments and services" for "academics, finances, mental health and more," without naming academic-integrity or accountability allegations among the issues it addresses — unlike an office that names that scope explicitly. SOS's published location, Administration Building, Room 2133, is the same room SARP itself publishes, which is recorded here rather than treated as evidence of independence either way. Because SOS does not itself claim to serve this concern, the docket records the absence directly rather than naming SOS as an advocacy office.

2026-09-03 — Section 02 procedure findings. TU 03-01.00 governs course-related and non-course-related violations at the instructor/department/dean level and states no evidentiary standard of its own for an individual case (its one use of "preponderance of evidence" concerns identifying which member of a group project is responsible, not a general burden of proof). A case that proceeds to a formal SARP hearing — a second offense, or certain non-course-related violations — is instead governed by the Code of Student Accountability, which does name "Preponderance of Evidence" as "the standard of proof used in accountability proceedings." Both documents are cited in section 02 rather than treating either alone as complete. "Who may be present" and the Hearing's audio recording are quoted from the Code rather than from 03-01.00, which does not address either. "What follows on the record" is quoted from both: 03-01.00's specific statement that a first-offense file is "not part of the student's disciplinary record or of the academic transcript," and the Code's general seven-year retention and FERPA-scoped disclosure limits for a case that reaches SARP. A right to remain silent was searched for in the Code's due-process list and not found named as such; the Code also does not state that a student is compelled to speak, so the finding is recorded as not stated rather than assumed either way. Disclosure to a graduate program, employer, or licensing board beyond the transcript itself was searched for in the Code's disciplinary-records section, the Registrar's pages, and the Graduate School's thesis and dissertation guidelines, and not found beyond the FERPA exceptions quoted in section 02.

2026-09-03 — Capture and gate status. This page traces to its packet with zero fidelity failures; the slug has been added to tools/fidelity-gate.txt. Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-09-04).

2026-09-13 — Editorial review. Carrie Schluter read this page in full against its recorded first-party sources and found no change required. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-09-13).

2026-09-25 — Dead-link repair and source re-verification, run by an automated agent in an attended session; Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-09-25). The OTS training PDF “Blackboard Student Assignments” (technology/training/blackboard/documents/student-assignment-turn-in.pdf) returned HTTP 404 to a cloud crawler and to curl on the host. OTS's Blackboard pages now cover Blackboard Ultra, and no successor document was located on towson.edu. The SafeAssign instruction quoted from it in section 01 is kept, labeled as last verified Sep 3, 2026 and no longer verifiable first-party, and the address is no longer linked. The source was dropped from the capture recipe; its last capture is preserved unaltered as tools/packets/towson-packet-withdrawn-turnin.txt. The TechHelp article that section 01 also quotes, and that still documents SafeAssign, re-verified verbatim. Every source in this page's capture recipe was re-fetched this date by tools/capture.py on the host (review capture tools/packets/review/towson-2026-09-25.txt); with that supplement the page traces with zero failures, and the capture was promoted. Detection status unchanged.

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