Design an AI Detection Appeal Process in Six Parts

Six questions, and a process that leaves any of them open is answering them under pressure with a student and a parent in the room. An escalation path of instructor, chair, dean and panel says who hears the case at each step. The wording at each step is the half an integrity office has to write.

• Notice: what the student is told, in writing.
• Report: which pages the student sees.
• Corroboration: what sits beside the score.
• Reviewer: who decides, and who cannot.
• Clock: the days allowed at each step.
• File: what survives the decision.

Turnitin said in 2023 that it does not make a determination of misconduct, and that the decision rests with the educator and institutional policy ¹. Read as a design constraint, that sentence says the vendor has handed over an input and kept none of the adjudication. The six parts below are what receives it.

An escalation path without wording is a diagram.

What a score alone can and cannot support is the prior question, and an office that has not answered it on paper will answer it differently in every case.

A notice that leads with a percentage invites an argument about the tool. A notice that leads with the assignment, the passages in question and the date gives the student something answerable. CUNY's policy sets a floor: where a student denies the charge in a case carrying only academic sanctions, it requires committee procedures that give the student, at a minimum, written notice of the charges, the right to appear, and the right to present witness statements or call witnesses ⁴.

• The assignment, the submission date, and the grade as it stands.
• The policy clause being applied, quoted in full.
• The specific passages at issue.
• What the detector reported, and what that reading does not settle.
• The name of the person who will review a response.
• The date a decision lands.

The percentage still belongs in the notice. It belongs in one sentence that says what it is: the submission was scored by the AI writing tool the institution licenses, that tool reported a share of the text as reading machine-written, and the reading is not by itself a finding of misconduct.

A notice is a question, not a verdict.

The student's half of this exchange is the appeal document itself, and an office that has read a few of those writes better notices.

The same pages the reviewer sees, at the same time, with nothing withheld as vendor material. A student asked to answer a highlighted paragraph is badly placed to answer a summary of one. In a 2023 post, Turnitin put its sentence-level false positive rate at around 4%, which works out at roughly 1 highlighted sentence in 25 that may have been written by the student ².

That is one vendor's figure for its own tool. Other detectors may publish a different figure or none, so a panel should ask its own vendor for the sentence-level rate. Either way, a page of highlights may contain a sentence the student wrote, and nothing printed on it marks which.

A reviewer who has never been told that reads the highlighting as a map.

Highlighting marks suspicion rather than authorship.

A guide to reading a detector's output is the document an appeal panel actually needs. Human publishes how to read its results at human.olive.is/research/how-it-works. A reading from Human goes sentence by sentence and ends in a document verdict of Human, Mixed or AI. This is an estimate from our detector. A flag should be reason to look closer and not verified proof of cheating. Anything under 50 words gets no score at all, and on 50 to 149 words the reading is weak, because the detector has less to read.

At least one item of evidence that isn't the detector, named in the policy before any case arrives. In a 2023 Stanford study, seven detectors tested on 91 TOEFL essays written by people misclassified more than half of them, an average false positive rate of 61.22% ³.

If a school's detector behaves on non-native English writing anything like those seven did, a score-only rule puts that writing at the most risk of a wrong finding. Whether it does is a question for the vendor.

• A revision history showing the text arriving in order.
• Writing the student produced in class, on paper.
• An account of the sources, given out loud.
• A named passage the student cannot place.

None of those four proves anything alone either. Saying so in advance spares a panel from deciding it in the room with a parent watching. What a corroboration rule fixes is the order of the work: the score prompts a look, and the look turns up the evidence a finding rests on. The score opens the file. Something else has to close it.

Who carries the burden in a misconduct hearing is the question this rule answers ahead of time, and it's far cheaper to answer on a quiet Tuesday than at a hearing.

Someone with no stake in the original report, named in the policy by role. Two published policies show what that looks like. CUNY bars its Academic Integrity Officer from serving on a college's Academic Integrity Committee, which keeps the officer handling a case off the panel that decides it ⁴. Ohio State adjudicates alleged academic misconduct through a formal hearing process run by a standing committee of the University Senate, drawn from faculty, graduate students and undergraduates ⁵.

A small school will say it has nobody spare. The options run wider than one department: a faculty member from another department, an ombuds office, a dean who didn't teach the course, a panel borrowed from a consortium partner. What counts is distance from the report.

Distance isn't enough on its own, though. A reviewer who can't read a detector report is likely to defer to the person who can, which weakens the separation. So the policy says, in one sentence, what training the reviewer gets. It can be short: a briefing on what the tool measures and what it can't.

How the policy gets explained to a parent is where an unnamed reviewer becomes visible. The first question a parent asks is who decides.

Two clocks, published side by side: the days a student has to respond and appeal, and the days the institution has to answer. Here's one suggestion, with the numbers left as the office's own choice: acknowledge in 5 working days, review in 10, decide in 10.

The file itself runs on a separate US federal deadline. Under FERPA (34 CFR 99.10), a school must let a parent or eligible student inspect education records within a reasonable time and no more than 45 days after the request ⁷. FERPA rights belong to the parent until the student turns 18 or enters a postsecondary institution, when they pass to the student ⁹. That's a records deadline, and it puts no limit on the appeal. Where the report and the case file are education records the school maintains, a parent or eligible student who asks to inspect them is owed access inside that window ⁷.

Grounds matter as much as deadlines. The University of Texas at Austin limits an appeal by an individual student, academic integrity cases included, to 3 grounds: significant procedural error, new information that was not reasonably foreseeable at the time of the hearing, and a sanction significantly disproportionate to the violation ⁶. That is one model, and narrow grounds of this kind force the first decision to carry its own weight. Where a policy carries a corroboration standard, a finding resting on a score alone can be argued as a procedural error, which the first ground covers.

The sixth part is the file, and it's the one that gets skipped. Write down what goes into it and who can read it. Then say how long it stays. Where a school declines to amend a record that a parent or eligible student says is inaccurate, misleading, or in violation of the student's privacy rights, FERPA (34 CFR 99.21, United States) gives that parent or eligible student a hearing to challenge the content of the record ⁸. The US Department of Education's guidance says the amendment right cannot be used to challenge a grade, an opinion, or a substantive decision made by a school about a student ⁹. Read that way, the hearing reaches what the record states and not the misconduct finding itself. If it ends without an amendment, the parent or eligible student can still put a written statement of disagreement in the file, and it's disclosed whenever the contested part of the record is disclosed ⁸.

Write the file for a reader who disagrees with it.

This is US federal law as the cited pages state it, not advice about any particular case, and state statutes and institutional policy sit on top of it.