AI Until Proven Human: What happens when students are falsely accused of academic misconduct

Some names have been changed.

What happens when you’re accused of using AI on assessed work? Your graduation might get pushed back, as what happened to a third-year medic. Or you might have to spend your whole summer proving your innocence, like one second-year student accused of cheating on her exam. Or you might get lucky and just have to complete an academic misconduct module, but who really knows? Of course, you could just … not use AI, right? 

Unfortunately, abstaining from AI use might not keep you out of the academic misconduct process. The second-year student? She didn’t cheat. She just got an extraordinarily high mark — too high for a first-year, her lecturers thought. The medic whose graduation has been pushed back? He was told, to his confusion, that his dissertation had been flagged both for strong vocabulary and weak language skills.

It was June of 2025 when Flora first learned something had gone wrong with her first-year exams. When her module grade appeared as a ten, much lower than expected, she “just assumed I was stupid and had f***ed up the exam.” In fact, the exact opposite was true. She later found out she had earned a strong first on one section of the test, which was flagged for potential AI use because of its “suspiciously” high quality. 

About five days after marks were released, Flora received an email from her School’s academic misconduct officer notifying her that they’d been “asked to convene a School Board of Adjudication to consider an allegation of academic misconduct concerning unauthorised use of AI.” She was sent a list of staff members who would be on the School Board and given back her exam paper with comments about suspected academic misconduct. They had highlighted sections that seemed “too high level” or contained what the school thought was overly technical jargon.

After submitting his dissertation last summer, Harrison Sharples, a third-year medic, received an email similar to Flora’s. His work had been flagged for potential AI use, and an online hearing was scheduled to take place three weeks later. He was given a list of the evidence against him, but the reasons “were kind of contradicting each other,” he recalled. One bullet point accused him of having a suspiciously excellent command of language, while another noted that his vocabulary and grammar were oddly weak. No specific examples of either were given, leaving Sharples confused. Still, he tried to prepare as best he could for the hearing, which consisted of a panel of School of Medicine staff members.

The questions Sharples was asked during the hearing “didn’t really make a lot of sense,” he explained. Staff asked him to define words he had used in his dissertation, both medical terms and other language that the Board thought sounded like AI. 

“I used the word ‘incarcerated,’ and that seemed suspicious to them,” Sharples recalled. ‘Psychopharmacology’ — the scientific study of the effects of drugs on the mind and behaviour — was also flagged. He thought this was especially strange. “We’re using these words all the time, even in our lectures,” he said. “So to question me on if I understand what the word means felt really, really odd.”

One week later, Sharples learned the allegations of AI usage had been upheld. His grade would be capped at a seven, and he would receive a strike on his General Medical Council record. This came as a shock; he had not realised that the allegations would carry over into his professional life. Worried that he might not be trusted as a medical student, he decided to make an appeal.

According to the University’s website, students can appeal the School Board’s decision if they either believe that “defective or irregular procedures” were used in the initial hearing or can demonstrate extenuating personal circumstances. 

Sharples appealed on the grounds that he had not been given specific reasons as to why the allegations against him were upheld. This appeal was approved, and a new hearing was scheduled for early November. Even though the first hearing had taken only thirty minutes, Sharples felt like the academic misconduct process was taking up his whole life. He spent hours researching how to help himself and prove his innocence. “It’s really hard to think about anything else when this whole thing is going on,” he said. 

Flora also found the academic misconduct timeline draining, having spent most of her summer waiting on the final outcome. She felt it wasn’t just her module grade in jeopardy, but her entire academic career. “It was about me dropping out or not,” she said, and that thought hung over her head for “eight or nine weeks.” It didn’t help that, like Sharples, her online School Board hearing went poorly.

“I came out of the call crying,” Flora said. “The tone [the Board] used was extremely aggressive.” The Student Union Advocacy Co-ordinator, who was present for the hearing, described it as “an interrogation” and “like a PhD Viva,” Flora recalled. University policy states that “a student attending a Board of Adjudication has the right to be accompanied and represented by another member of the University.”

The Board mostly questioned Flora on the content of the exam — which had taken place two months prior. Deep into summer, she “wasn't prepared” to answer specific technical questions. “There was no advice [before the hearing],” Flora said, “I was told it was going to be about AI in general. I was told it wasn’t going to be about the actual content, but it was about the content.” 

As evidence, Flora submitted thirty pages of flashcards, screenshotted essay plans, revision plans from March, and her diagram research — all with time stamps so that the Board could use Google Docs to see that she was “progressively working on it.” She prepared a statement and chose to read it out during the hearing, but felt she didn’t express herself as well as she could because she was so “terrified” by the “aggressive,” “overly formal,” and “stilted” tone of the Board members. 

Just like Sharples, Flora found out a week later that the allegations had been upheld. She decided to appeal the decision as well. 

Both Sharples and Flora found their appeals hearings at the University Board level “much better” than their first hearing with their respective School Boards. Far from the “aggressive” first hearing, Flora thought the University Board members were “so lovely” and wondered if it was because academic staff on the University Board took the potential AI use as less of a personal attack than the School Board members did. “[During the School Board hearing] it did feel like they just kind of had their opinion, and that was the end of it,” Sharples agreed, whereas the University Board was more open to what he had to say. 

After the School Board hearing, Flora decided to request further evidence. She obtained emails between various University staff members concerning her academic misconduct case. In some, lecturers wrote that “she can’t get away with this” and that they “needed to catch her.” Though Flora agrees that the University should investigate suspected AI cases, she was upset by the way staff wrote about her, especially after she discovered that her School had contacted IT services just days after her exam. After they asked if any technical abnormalities were visible on her computer, IT wrote back to the school saying that “there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.” Learning that staff continued to treat her as guilty in internal emails even after IT denied it was “so f***ing hurtful,” she said. “They would rather believe I would use a thumb drive than actually use my own brain.” 

Though completed on a computer, Flora’s exam was in-person, making the possibility of AI usage especially difficult. Flora said that the School Board couldn’t figure out how she’d managed to cheat during an invigilated exam. Instead of asking her if the allegations were true, they repeatedly pushed her to explain how she had done it even though she had not. When Flora learned the allegations had been upheld, the mechanism was listed as “unknown.” The University was never able to prove that the way she had been accused of cheating was possible without IT’s knowledge.

Both Flora and Sharples won their appeals. The charges were dropped, and any evidence that the whole affair had ever happened was scrubbed from their transcripts. Even with records now as clean as their consciences had been all along, however, the impact of the experience lingers. 

When I spoke with Flora last autumn in St Mary’s Quad, she turned her head at the sound of every falling leaf, nervous that one of the staff members from her hearing might walk by and overhear. She told me she checked for open windows before choosing a bench to sit at, just in case any of her lecturers happened to be inside. Before her academic misconduct case, she loved her School and enjoyed attending classes there — now she dislikes even going into the building for fear of running into the professors who served on her School Board hearing.

One fourth-year student, Hazel, has completely stopped taking modules entirely on the Biology side of her Joint Degree after being accused of using AI. Last semester, she took an open-book class test after which she, along with every other student in her module, received an email that they were being investigated for academic misconduct. “We were all in shock,” she said. No one had heard of something like this happening before. 

Before the test, students were simply told not to use AI and received no other guidance about it. Hazel herself received a written warning, after which she realised she had “accidentally” used AI by taking information from sources linked in AI overview, an automatic Google search feature. Hazel was completely open with the School of Biology about the way in which she used Google, but she was confused as to why AI guidance hadn’t been more specific, when she had been encouraged to use Google for open-book exams since her first year. 

“They’d never mentioned before that Gemini AI summaries weren’t allowed, and the University didn’t tell us how to turn it off,” she said. “I don’t even know if there is a way to turn it off.” 

Hazel later asked to meet with the School of Biology’s Academic Misconduct Officer to discuss how guidance could be more specific in order to avoid what happened in her module: “His response was that you simply don’t use AI.” She wanted to have a conversation about “how to integrate different rules,” but felt like she hit a “wall” every time she tried to start it. “The school doesn't want to talk about AI, but then they'll be so quick to put their foot down on any suspected use of it,” she explained.

None of the students interviewed felt that the University should ignore potential AI use; they just felt it should consider the student side of the academic misconduct process by prioritising faster timelines and communicating specific concerns better. “I get why they're so worried about it, but it's a hard thing to pin down. It just seems like no one really knows what they're looking for,” said Sharples.

“It seems like there’s so much pressure for [the University] to catch people who use AI,” Flora said. “Maybe I’m just a scapegoat for that.” Still, she found it “weird” when she met with professors after the allegations against her had been dropped, who still acted like she had done something wrong. Instead of apologising for the stress caused, one staff member who had participated in the School Board hearing told Flora that she only achieved a high mark on her exam because she “felt the need to know too much detail because [she] didn't have good foundational knowledge.” Even after the final University decision, Flora felt that staff members were still trying to find something wrong with her work because they were “too proud” to admit they’d made a mistake. As Hazel put it, the academic misconduct process makes you feel as if “you’re guilty [until] proven innocent” when concerning suspected AI use. 

Sharples was so overwhelmed by the academic misconduct process that he deferred his Martinmas exams and thus will not be graduating this summer with the rest of his cohort: “After that happened, I heard nothing from them. Not even an apology.” Eight months on from her appeal, Flora’s grade has yet to change back to what she originally earned on the exam. “University centres have a tendency to forget that they're not just making random policies,” Flora said, “They're affecting people's entire lives and trajectories.” 

The University did not reply to The Saint’s request for comment.

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia