The hearing

The hearing: who decides, and how to be ready

Formats vary — a panel of faculty and students, an honor council, or a single conduct officer — and your notice or handbook names yours. The schools table records the format for every school in our dataset. Whatever the format, the shape of the meeting is the same.

They present the case first. Expect the score to be read aloud as if it settles something. It doesn't — it opens the case. Listen for what else they have. In a score-only case, there is nothing else, and it is fair to say so, once, calmly: the score is the whole of it.

Then it is your turn, and the trail does the talking. Bring the evidence file in the ranked order from the evidence page. Offer to walk one paragraph of the paper from note to draft to final. Panels remember a demonstration longer than a speech.

The questions are predictable. “Did you use AI?” — answer it directly, then point to the trail. ”Can you explain this passage?” — this is why you re-read your own paper before the hearing; knowing your argument cold is itself evidence. ”Why does the program say this?” — answer with the mechanism, briefly: the program flags patterns, patterns are not authorship, and here is what the vendor's own documentation concedes about its limits.

Bring one page, not forty. A single-page timeline — assignment date, drafts, sittings from the version history, submission — handed to each person in the room. Hearings are won on what the deciders can hold in their heads afterward.

Afterward: decisions usually come in writing, with a date. That date starts your appeal window if the finding goes against you. Keep the letter, keep the file, and count the window the day it arrives — the checker counts from any notice date you give it.