Plagiarism and AI at Nottingham: what False Authorship covers

The short answer

Nottingham does not have a separate AI offence. It has False Authorship, and AI, essay mills, translation software and paraphrasing tools all live inside it. That matters because a first finding of False Authorship skips your school entirely and goes to the university-level committee — the one that can withdraw a degree.

The governing document is the Regulation on academic misconduct, version 1.3, July 2026. Worth noticing before anything else: three of its four versions exist because of AI. This is a rulebook being actively rewritten around the problem.

False Authorship, defined

Here is the definition, in full:

“False Authorship is where a student is not the sole author of the work they have submitted as their own work. False Authorship is a form of plagiarism but is distinguished by the fact that the student has engaged with an unauthorised or unacknowledged third party and/or software tool to complete an assessment, either in part or whole.”

Notice “and/or software tool”. Most universities separate contract cheating from AI misuse. Nottingham treats them as the same wrong, because from its point of view they are: the work is not solely yours.

The scope is spelled out, and it is wide:

“False Authorship can be via direct contact with an individual or through a platform, or software (such as Course Hero or similar). This may include work produced by another student, an essay mill, a family member or friend, or a tutoring service (such as Chegg, or similar). […] As it is the authorship of work that is contested, there is no requirement to prove that the work has been purchased. For clarity this includes the over-reliance on translation or paraphrasing software (for example Grammarly), including when it is used to conceal the original author or source material or to translate more than individual phrases or words.”

Two things there deserve attention. Nobody has to show money changed hands — the question is authorship, not commerce. And a family member helping counts, which catches a lot of well-meaning students who would never describe what they did as cheating.

The AI limb is explicit about the tools:

“False Authorship includes the submission of work that is generated and/or improved by software that is not permitted for that assessment. This may include the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) software to produce text, images or data or other work (e.g., Copilot, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, BARD, Wordtune, Quillbot, DALL-E, chatbots and similar). Clear, assessment-specific information about the permitted use of Generative AI tools will be provided for every element of summative assessment. Students are responsible for checking this information and seeking clarification where necessary.”

The word that catches editing

“Generated and/or improved”. Read that carefully, because it is broader than almost any other university’s wording in this series. Nottingham is not only concerned with software that writes your essay — it is concerned with software that polishes it, where that is not permitted for the assessment.

We should be straight about what that means for tools like ours. Our check marks filler, hedging and tired transitions in your own sentences and suggests plainer wording; nothing is rewritten for you, which is a deliberate design choice and the safer side of most lines. But at Nottingham the permitted scope is set per assessment, and if your brief says no software assistance, that includes the helpful kind. Check the brief, not the general principle.

There is a second sentence, under plagiarism, that closes the obvious escape route:

“Paraphrasing or re-ordering the words of plagiarised text to avoid Turnitin matches is plagiarism if the ideas are represented as the student’s own.”

That is as clear a statement as you will find that beating the similarity score is not the point. The offence is about whose ideas they are. Anyone selling you a way to lower a percentage is selling you something that does not address the thing you would actually be accused of — see what a Turnitin score actually means.

Why a first offence skips the school

At most universities a first, minor case is handled by your school and stays there. Nottingham lists the circumstances in which a case goes straight to a panel of the Academic Misconduct Committee, and the first item is the one to know:

“i) Has a finding of False Authorship or impersonation by a School or Department. […] v) Is a Postgraduate Research student (unless the misconduct has taken place in a first year, taught module).”

So a first finding of AI-written or third-party-written work is not a school matter at Nottingham. It goes up. And every postgraduate research case goes up, whatever it is.

The reach is wider than coursework, too. A summative assessment “includes postgraduate research students’ annual reviews and thesis submissions”, and misconduct covers “activity or behaviour during preparation for a summative assessment even if there is no direct evidence of misconduct in the submitted assessment itself”.

Degree revocation is published

Among the penalties available to that committee, listed alongside zeros and suspensions:

“k) withdraw the award of a degree or other qualification from a former student of the University”

And the regulation makes clear it can reach you after you leave: it applies “to all students of the University, whether currently registered or not”, and “Former students will be subject to the academic misconduct regulations that were in place whilst they were a registered student.”

Nottingham is the only university in this UK batch that publishes this power in terms. That is not a reason to panic — it sits at the top of a long ladder — but it is a reason to take a graduation-year assessment as seriously as a first-year one.

What the evidence has to be

Nottingham publishes no decision about whether Turnitin’s AI-writing indicator is switched on or off. We looked, and there is nothing either way, so we will not tell you.

What it does publish, more than once, is that a score cannot decide a case:

“The amount of material deemed to be academic misconduct is a matter of academic judgment and cannot be determined by a Turnitin report alone.”

The procedure requires the officer to work from “the appropriate Turnitin Similarity Report, the identified original sources (where reasonably available), and an annotated version of the student’s assessment, as a minimum” — so a percentage without the underlying sources is not enough.

And where authorship itself is in question, the evidence is spoken:

“For cases where the authorship of the assessment is contested, the meeting will be conducted in the manner of oral questioning: the student will be asked questions regarding the assessment subject to the allegation.”

That is the practical answer to an AI allegation at Nottingham: a conversation about your own work. Prepare for it the way you would a viva — why you framed the question that way, what changed your mind, what you rejected. Drafts and dated version history make it straightforward. See how to prove you wrote it yourself and what to do when you are accused.

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.

The same caution applies to our own tool as to Turnitin’s: our published error rates are measured on English and German corpora, and no detector produces proof. How accurate AI detectors really are sets out why.

Intent is not required

This is the clause students most often get wrong:

“It is not necessary to prove intention to commit academic misconduct to make a finding of academic misconduct. However, proven intent to commit academic misconduct is likely to be considered an aggravating factor when determining a penalty.”

“I didn’t mean to” is not a defence to the finding. It may well matter to the penalty. Those are two different stages and it is worth arguing in the right one.

The standard of proof is the balance of probabilities — “evidence indicating that, on the balance of probabilities, academic misconduct has occurred will be deemed sufficient for action”.

And one door is explicitly closed: “Students cannot use other procedures e.g., Extenuating Circumstances or Academic Appeals, to request an outcome that would change a penalty for academic misconduct.” The guidance is also blunt about what does not count as mitigation — “feeling ‘below par’ or experiencing the typical symptoms associated with assessments (e.g. anxiety, sleeping disturbances, feeling nauseous etc) are not considered to be mitigating factors.”

The published tariff

At school level, on the papers alone, the outcome is a written warning, with the lower standard of the work reflected in the mark.

At school level after a meeting: a written warning; a mark of zero for the specific material; an overall percentage reduction reflecting how much of the work was affected; or a mark of zero for the entire piece of coursework or examination. There is also an unusual option — where an academic penalty is not appropriate, a fine “up to a maximum of £250”.

At committee level, any of the above plus: zero for the entire module; zero for all assessments in the semester; zero for the whole year — each of the last two noted as applying “even where this will lead to, for example, a reduction in degree class or the award of a lower qualification”; required reassessment before progressing; for research students, confirmation of probationary status, resubmission of a thesis with or without a viva, or a further period of supervision; suspension or termination of the course; and the withdrawal of a degree.

Cases flagged as likely to bring at least a zero for the whole piece: unauthorised pre-prepared materials in an exam, “Submission of fabricated data”, and accessing Moodle or websites during an exam.

You cannot appeal the finding

This asymmetry is easy to miss and important to plan around. After a Committee decision:

“Students cannot appeal against the finding of academic misconduct but may appeal against the penalty only on the grounds that a different penalty be imposed.”

In other words, the hearing itself is where the question of whether you did it is settled — permanently. There is no second bite. That is the strongest possible argument for turning up prepared, with your drafts and your version history, rather than treating the meeting as a formality.

At school level you have 10 working daysto accept the officer’s outcome or ask for a School Academic Misconduct meeting. A Review Request goes to the Director of Registry and Academic Affairs, and “dissatisfaction with the outcome alone does not constitute grounds for requesting a review”. Once internal routes are exhausted, Nottingham issues a Completion of Procedures letter for the Office of the Independent Adjudicator.

Nottingham does not publish annual case counts, so nobody can tell you how often any of this happens.

Before you submit

• Read the AI paragraph for that specific assessment. The regulation promises one for every element of summative assessment, and makes checking it your responsibility.
• Treat translation and paraphrasing tools as in scope. Grammarly is named in the regulation by name.
• Do not let anyone else write or rewrite passages — including a friend or a family member. No purchase is needed for it to be False Authorship.
• Keep drafts and version history. Contested authorship is decided by oral questioning, and you only get one hearing on the finding.
• Do not chase a lower similarity score. Re-ordering words to avoid matches is named as plagiarism in its own right.

If you want a read on your own text before you hand it in, our AI check is free up to 1,500 words, with no account and no name. Our published error rates are measured on English and German corpora, and no detector — ours included — produces proof.

Sources

• University of Nottingham: Regulation on academic misconduct — version 1.3, July 2026, approved by the Quality and Standards Committee.
• University of Nottingham: Academic Misconduct Procedure — created May 2018, updated May 2023.
• University of Nottingham: Guidance on the application of academic misconduct penalties — first published 2020/21, updated September 2021.

This page is orientation, not legal advice. What binds you is the assessment-specific guidance for your module and the University Quality Manual.