Plagiarism and AI at Coventry: the rules exist, but you have to sign in to read them

The short answer

Coventry’s academic misconduct rules exist and are current, but they are not readable on the open web — they sit inside Word documents on a sign-in-protected tenant, and there is no public student-facing integrity page at all. So this page cannot tell you what counts as misconduct at Coventry, or what it costs. Nobody outside the login wall can.

What it can do is tell you exactly which documents and sections to ask for, who to ask, and what is worth doing while you wait for an answer. This is a short page on purpose. We would rather leave a gap visible than fill it with rules we have invented.

What we looked for, and did not find

We want to be specific about the search, because “we could not find it” is only useful if you know how hard someone looked.

• The obvious address — coventry.ac.uk/students/academic-support/academic-integrity/ — does not exist. It errors and redirects to Coventry’s 404 page.
• We downloaded Coventry’s public sitemap and searched it in full. It contains no page whose URL mentions integrity, misconduct or plagiarism, other than research project pages.
• The student support page at coventry.ac.uk/study-at-coventry/student-support/academic-support/ exists, and links to the Centre for Academic Writing, the Library, LinkedIn Learning and Young Adult Carers. There is no integrity page among them.
• We fetched the published Student Contract. It contains no occurrence of the words misconduct, integrity, plagiarism, cheating, artificial or Turnitin.

As a result, none of the following could be established from a public Coventry source: which similarity tool is used; whether AI-writing detection is used or any position on it; whether students can self-check before submitting; whether submissions go into a comparison repository and for how long; the categories of misconduct, including whether contract cheating or unauthorised AI use is a named category; whether an AI acknowledgement is required; the penalty tariff; the standard of proof; whether an external review stage applies; the approving bodies and approval dates of the regulations; or any case data.

Be careful how you read that list. It means not published, not does not exist. Coventry almost certainly has answers to every one of those questions written down. They are simply on the other side of a sign-in.

The distinction between the two kinds of gap matters, so we will be exact about which is which. The academic integrity page genuinely does not exist — a 404 is the site telling you there is nothing at that address. The regulations plainly do exist: their index pages are public, their annual editions are listed, and their sections are named. Those are unreadable, not absent. Anyone who tells you Coventry has no academic misconduct rules is wrong.

Where the rules actually are

This is the useful part. Coventry publishes its regulations as Microsoft Word documents on a SharePoint tenant that requires sign-in, indexed from two public pages: Academic Regulations and General Regulations, both under the Registry section of the site.

Both index pages list every academic year from 2021-22 to 2026-27, one link per year. So the edition structure is public even though the text is not — which is genuinely useful, because it means you can identify the edition that applied when your assessment was set, rather than the current one.

The sections that matter, by name:

• General Regulations, Section 2 — Code of Conduct
• General Regulations, Appendix 1 — Examinations and other Assessments: Responsibilities of Students
• General Regulations, Appendix 7 — Student Disciplinary Procedures
• Academic Regulations, Section 5 — Regulations for the Assessment of Students
• Academic Regulations, Appendix 2 — Procedures for Reviewing Award Decisions and Considering Appeals by Students

If you are a current Coventry student, you can sign in and open all of these today. Do it before you need them, not after. And save a local copy of the edition that applies to you — a link into a document library is not a durable record of what the rules said in the year you were assessed.

If you are a prospective student, an applicant, a parent, or an examiner elsewhere trying to understand a Coventry transcript, you cannot read any of it. That is worth knowing before you ask us why this page is shorter than our others.

What to ask for, and who to ask

Vague requests get vague answers. Because the section names above are public, you can ask precisely, and precision is what gets a document sent to you.

Coventry names a Resolution Unit within its Registry, which it describes as handling complaints, disciplinaries, result reviews and appeals. Its published contact address is gru.reg@coventry.ac.uk. That is the office to write to about procedure.

Four things worth asking for in writing:

• The edition that applies to you. “Please confirm which edition of the General Regulations applies to assessments set in my course year, and send me Appendix 7.”
• The AI position for your assessment. Ask your module leader, not the Registry: is generative AI permitted for this assessment, in what scope, and how should it be acknowledged? Keep the reply.
• Whether submissions are checked, and by what. If you are told a similarity or AI report exists in your case, ask to see it — and ask what weight it carries in the decision.
• Deadlines. If a case is opened, ask on day one for the deadline to respond and the deadline to appeal, in writing. You cannot look these up from outside, so get them from the person handling your case.

If a case has already been opened, what to do when you are accused of using AI sets out the order to do things in, and it applies with more force here than at a university whose procedure you can read in advance.

If a detector score is what started this, our guide to an AI detector flagging your thesis sets out what that number does and does not establish on its own.

If you are writing to the Resolution Unit or to your course team, a short, specific message gets a faster answer than a long one. Something like this covers it: your name and student number; your course and the academic year the assessment was set in; the section you want, by name; and, if a case has been opened, the reference and the date of the letter you received. Ask for the document as an attachment rather than a link, so that you have a copy that does not depend on your access continuing.

Keep the correspondence. In a system where you cannot cite a public policy page, an email from the university stating the rule is the next best thing — and in a dispute about what you were told, it is better.

The awkward part

There is one detail we found that is worth stating plainly, without insinuating anything about anyone’s motives.

The only integrity-adjacent pages in Coventry’s entire public sitemap are Coventry’s own research pages: it hosts the Partnership for University Plagiarism Prevention, a research programme on plagiarism prevention, and publishes project pages about it.

So Coventry publishes research about plagiarism policy on the open web while publishing no student-facing plagiarism policy of its own there. That is not a rule being broken, and it is not evidence of anything improper. It is simply a gap that is easy to close, and worth noting because a student searching Coventry’s own site for “plagiarism” will find the research programme and not the rules that bind them.

Why an unreadable policy matters

It would be easy to shrug at this. Current students can sign in, so who is actually harmed? Three groups, and one of them is you.

Students who have left. A misconduct process can outlast your access. If your account is closed or your enrolment lapses while a case or an appeal is running, the rules governing that process become unreadable to you at exactly the moment you need them most. This is the strongest practical argument for downloading the documents now, while you can, and keeping your own copies.

Anyone advising you.A students’ union adviser has access; a parent, a friend at another university, a solicitor, or a translator helping you read a formal letter does not. If you want someone outside the university to help you respond, you will have to supply the regulations to them yourself.

Anyone comparing institutions.If you are choosing where to do a Master’s, you can read Leeds’ penalty tariff and Manchester Met’s penalty matrix before you apply. You cannot read Coventry’s. That is not a reason to avoid Coventry — plenty of good universities publish badly — but it is a reason to ask the question during an offer-holder day rather than after enrolment.

There is also a quieter effect. When rules are hard to reach, students substitute rumour for them: what a housemate said, what a forum post claimed, what was true three years ago. A confident second-hand account of a rule nobody has opened is worth nothing in an investigation. The fix is dull and it works: open the document.

What holds regardless

We are not going to invent Coventry’s rules. But some things are true at every UK university, and are worth acting on while you get hold of the documents.

The assessment brief governs. Wherever you study, the specific permission or prohibition for your piece of work comes from the brief and the module handbook, not from a university-wide document. That is as true at Coventry as anywhere, and it is the one source you already have access to.

Your working record is the evidence. Across the UK institutions we have read, the trend is away from treating a detector score as proof and towards asking the student to demonstrate authorship — drafts, version history, notes, saved outputs from any tool used. That record costs nothing to keep and cannot be reconstructed afterwards. Our guide to proving you wrote it yourself is the practical version.

Third-party help is the common trap. Every UK academic misconduct regime we have read treats work produced by someone else and submitted as yours as a serious offence, and several define it broadly enough to include a friend or a relative with no money changing hands. We cannot tell you how Coventry defines it, because that definition is behind the sign-in. But it is not a place to guess: if someone is going to read, edit or contribute to your work, confirm what is allowed before they start.

Disclosure is cheap and protective. Where AI use is permitted, a short acknowledgement naming the tool, what it did and where, costs you nothing and closes off the worst version of a later conversation. Our AI disclosure statement guide shows the shape. If your Coventry brief is silent on whether to acknowledge, ask — and if you cannot get an answer, acknowledging is the safer error.

No score is proof. Since Coventry publishes no position on detection, you may be told nothing about how a suspicion arose. If a percentage is ever put to you, remember that no detector — ours included — establishes who wrote a document. Our own published error rates are measured on English and German corpora, and we publish them precisely because a number without an error rate is not evidence. The longer version is in how accurate AI detectors really are. If what you are shown is a similarity percentage rather than an AI score, the two are different things and are routinely confused; we untangle them in what a Turnitin score actually means.

The brief is the only rule you can read today. That is worth repeating as a conclusion rather than an aside. Everything else at Coventry is behind a sign-in, but the assessment brief is in your hands right now, and at every university we have looked at it is the document that decides the specific question — whether AI is permitted here, in what scope, and how to say so. If the brief is silent, the silence is worth an email.

Before you submit

• Sign in and download the regulations now — General Regulations Appendix 7 and Academic Regulations Section 5 and Appendix 2 — for the year your assessment was set. Save local copies.
• Get the AI position for your assessment in writing from the module leader, and keep the email.
• Keep dated drafts and version history, plus saved outputs from any tool you used.
• Acknowledge any permitted AI use: which tool, for what, on which parts.
• If a case opens, ask for the deadlines on day one. You cannot look them up from outside the login.

Sources

• Coventry University: General Regulations — public index of annual editions 2021-22 to 2026-27; the documents themselves require sign-in. Contains Section 2 (Code of Conduct), Appendix 1 and Appendix 7 (Student Disciplinary Procedures).
• Coventry University: Academic Regulations — public index of annual editions 2021-22 to 2026-27; sign-in required for the text. Contains Section 5 and Appendix 2 (appeals).
• Coventry University: Registry — names the Resolution Unit (gru.reg@coventry.ac.uk) as handling complaints, disciplinaries, result reviews and appeals.
• Coventry University: Partnership for University Plagiarism Prevention — the research programme; the only integrity-adjacent entry in the public sitemap.
• Coventry University: The Student Contract — checked; contains no reference to misconduct, integrity, plagiarism or detection.

If you want to see how much a university can publish, our pages on Leeds (a Senate-approved policy, a red/amber/green AI scheme and a full penalty tariff), Manchester Met (a published penalty matrix and standard of proof) and Sheffield (an explicit published decision not to use AI detection tools) are the contrast. If you want to see what our own check reports on a document, it is at the AI check.

This page is orientation, not legal advice — and here more than anywhere, it is orientation only. What binds you is your assessment brief, Coventry’s General Regulations and its Academic Regulations for the relevant academic year. Read them. You will have to sign in.