Plagiarism and AI at NYU Arts and Science: the grade and the sanction are two decisions

The short answer

In NYU’s College of Arts and Science, an integrity case produces two separate decisions — what grade your work earns, and whether you are disciplined — and they travel down different routes with different appeals. The grade route ends fast: it is reviewed inside your department only, and the bulletin says that decision is final.

So the moment to act is early, with your director of undergraduate studies, while the question is still what your work is worth. Everything below is the CAS and GSAS regime, which is not the same as NYU university-wide.

Which NYU this is

The caveat has to come first, because getting it wrong would mislead you. Everything on this page comes from the NYU Bulletin’s Arts and Science academic-policies page, and it documents the regime of the College of Arts and Science and the Graduate School of Arts and Science.

NYU Stern, NYU Tandon, Gallatin and the other schools set their own rules. If you are not in CAS or GSAS, read this as context and go and find your own school’s statement. NYU itself draws the line explicitly, in a dated jurisdictional split:

“Effective August 12, 2018, allegations of nonacademicmisconduct, as outlined in the University Student Conduct Policy, against a student of the College of Arts and Science or the Graduate School of Arts and Science, shall be addressed pursuant to the procedures set forth in the NYU Student Conduct Procedures and administered by the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards… Allegations of academic misconduct (plagiarism, cheating, etc.) against a student of the College of Arts and Science or the Graduate School of Arts and Science shall continue to be addressed by the schoolin accordance with established procedures.”

That is the seam in NYU’s own words. Plagiarism and cheating stay inside Arts and Science. Non-academic conduct goes to the central office under the Senior Vice President of Student Affairs. If someone tells you your plagiarism case is going to University Student Conduct, that is not what this document says.

The bulletin page carries no page-level revision date. The individual rules carry their own approval dates, and we quote them where they exist.

Two decisions, not one

This is the most useful paragraph NYU CAS publishes, and it is worth reading twice:

“In cases of academic misconduct, evaluation of the student’s academic performance is distinguished from disciplinary adjudication of the offense. The question of what grade the student’s work should earn is distinct from that about whether a disciplinary sanction should also be imposed. When a student is found to have engaged in academic misconduct, the instructor may reduce the student’s grade for the assignment or for the course as a whole; however, such a determination is an academic judgment made by the instructor in accord with the expectations of the department or program offering the course and is not a form of disciplinary sanction.”

Three practical consequences follow, and most students discover them the hard way.

A zero is not a disciplinary finding. If your instructor reduces your grade, that is an academic judgment. It can happen without a hearing, and it is not by itself something that puts you on probation.

But it also is not nothing. A substantial finding is reported upward, and a second one is treated as a second offence. The grade and the record are separate, and the record is being kept.

The two decisions have different appeals. The grade goes to a departmental review that is described as final. The disciplinary track runs to a committee. Confusing them costs you the chance to contest the one you actually care about.

There is also real room at the bottom of the scale, which students rarely know about:

“When it is believed that violations of academic integrity may have occurred it is within the discretion of the faculty member to address the matter informally with the student should the infraction be judged insubstantial or should the evidence be inconclusive. In such cases the faculty member may determine that no grade reduction is warranted.”

“Should the evidence be inconclusive” is written into the rule. An instructor who is unsure has an explicit, sanctioned route to talk to you and let it go. If a conversation is opened with you, it may genuinely be that conversation and not the start of a case — and how you answer matters. Being able to walk someone through how the piece was written is the single most effective thing you can do; 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.

Who decides, and in what order

Escalation past the informal stage needs a second signature. The instructor cannot simply act alone:

“Should the faculty member judge the violation substantial and well supported by the evidence, he or she may, with the assent of the director of undergraduate studies … reduce the student’s grade or assign the student a failing grade for the assignment in question or for the course as a whole.”

So the director of undergraduate studies is a real checkpoint, and they are the person your departmental appeal will go to as well. Learn who they are for your department.

Then a written notification, on a deadline:

“In all instances in which there has been a finding that a CAS student committed a substantial violation of academic integrity standards … the director of undergraduate studies will inform the student within seven (7) calendar daysin writing and/or via email of any action taken and send copies of this letter to the CAS Associate Dean for Students, the faculty member, and the department chair or program director.”

Seven calendar days, in writing, with copies to three other people. If a finding has been made against you, you should receive that letter — and it is your evidence of what was actually decided and when. Keep it.

What happens next depends on whether it is your first:

“If this is the student’s first incident of academic misconduct, the Associate Dean for Students will warn the student in person and in writing that a suspension or a more severe penalty may result from a second academic integrity offense of any kind.”

“If this is the student’s second or further incident of academic misconduct, the Associate Dean for Students will meet with the student, discuss the evidence of academic misconduct, and provide the student an opportunity to respond. … Where the Associate Dean is unable to resolve the complaint by consensual resolution, the matter will be referred to the Committee on Student Discipline.”

Read “of any kind” carefully. A second offence does not have to resemble the first. A citation problem in one course and an AI question in another are, for this purpose, incident one and incident two.

The ladder, then, is:

• Instructor — decides the grade.
• Director of undergraduate studies — must assent to a substantial finding, and writes to you within seven days.
• CAS Associate Dean for Students — warns on a first incident; on a later one, meets you, hears your response, and tries consensual resolution.
• Arts and Science Committee on Student Discipline — the contested cases.

The Associate Dean stage is the one where an “opportunity to respond” is written into the text. Prepare for it as the hearing it effectively is.

The appeal that is departmental and final

This is the trap, and the reason the page is titled the way it is:

“For incidents of academic misconduct, the student’s appeal of the grade reduction is limited to departmental review conducted by the director of undergraduate studies and/or the department chair, as specified in the CAS policy for grade appeals. The review will be limited to the question of whether the reduction in grade was made fairly and in keeping with the expectations of the department or program.”

“The decision of the department or program on the student’s appeal is final.”

Three things a student needs to take from that.

The question on appeal is narrow.It is not “did I do it”. It is whether the reduction was made fairly and in line with what the department normally expects. An appeal written as a denial of the underlying accusation is answering a question nobody asked. An appeal written as “here is the process that produced this grade, here is what my department normally does, here is the gap” is answering the right one.

The reviewer may be the same person who assented.The director of undergraduate studies gives assent to the substantial finding, and the director of undergraduate studies “and/or the department chair” conducts the review. If that concerns you, ask in writing who will conduct it before you file.

There is no route above the department for the grade. “Final” is the bulletin’s word. Whatever you want considered — drafts, timestamps, notes, an explanation of your writing process — has to be in front of the department the first time, because there is no second time.

The disciplinary side is different: that runs through the Associate Dean and, if unresolved, the Committee on Student Discipline. The bulletin does not describe a further appeal from the Committee, and we are not going to guess at one.

One more absence worth stating: no standard of proof is namedanywhere in these rules. The text uses ordinary phrases — “well supported by the evidence”, “should the evidence be inconclusive” — and never a formal burden such as preponderance of the evidence. So there is no published threshold for you to point at. The word that is published, and that you can point at, is “inconclusive”.

Why the record has to exist first

Put the three published facts side by side and a conclusion falls out of them.

• An instructor may drop a matter where “the evidence be inconclusive”.
• Escalation requires a judgment that the violation is “well supported by the evidence”.
• The appeal is departmental, narrow, and “final”.

All the leverage is at the front. By the time you are appealing, the question has narrowed to whether the grade reduction was fair and in keeping with departmental expectations — and there is no stage after that. Whatever you would want a reviewer to see has to be in front of the instructor and the director of undergraduate studies at the earliest possible moment.

That is an argument for keeping a record while you write, not for assembling one under pressure. A reconstruction produced after an allegation is weaker than a trail that already existed, and it is obviously weaker to the person reading it.

What is worth having, in rough order of usefulness:

• Version history. Write in something that keeps it automatically. A document that has evolved over three weeks, with sentences appearing, moving and being cut, is the most ordinary and most persuasive thing you can show.
• Your notes and reading. The annotated PDFs, the reading list, the half-formed paragraph you wrote before you found the source that changed your mind. These show thinking, which is the thing actually in question.
• Earlier work in the same voice. A paper from last semester establishes what your writing normally looks like. If your prose is being read as unusual, the useful comparison is with your own prose, not with an average.
• A written note of any tool you used, and for what. If you used a spellchecker, a reference manager or a translation aid, saying so calmly and precisely is far better than being asked and having to remember.
• Your correspondence with the instructor, including any permission you were given.

None of this is about defeating a tool. It is about being able to answer the question an instructor is entitled to ask, which is how the work came to exist. If you are writing in English as a second language, that capacity matters more, because carefully edited second-language prose can read as unusually uniform — see AI detectors and non-native speakers.

One more piece of the record is easy to overlook: your sources. If a generative tool was involved anywhere near your bibliography, check that every reference exists and says what you claim it says before you submit. A citation to a work that does not exist is a far worse problem than a stylistic suspicion, and it belongs to the “falsification of data or sources” branch of NYU’s own misconduct definition rather than to any AI debate. See how to verify citations.

The four sanctions, defined in 2014

The list is short, and the definitions carry an explicit approval line: “Approved by the Faculty of Arts and Science, April 21, 2014”. That is the approving body and the date.

“The following penalties may be imposed by the faculty for disciplinary infractions: Warning · Probation · Suspension · Dismissal”

• Warning:“Written reprimand, including notice that a one-semester suspension or a more severe penalty may result from a second disciplinary offense within the period of the censurespecified in the letter of reprimand.” The censure period is stated in your letter — so read the letter for the date on which it expires.
• Disciplinary probation:“Suspension of privileges or exclusion from participation in extracurricular University activities as set forth in the notice of disciplinary probation for a specified period of time.”
• Suspension:“Exclusion from classes as well as suspension of privileges… for a definite period of time. A student who has been suspended and against whom charges are dismissed or not sustained will be allowed full opportunity to make up whatever work was missed due to the suspension.” That second sentence is a genuine protection: an interim suspension that ends in your favour is not supposed to cost you the semester.
• Dismissal:“Termination of student status for an indefinite period. The conditions for readmission, if any are permitted, will be stated in the order of dismissal.”

Note the vocabulary. CAS’s terminal sanction is called dismissal, not expulsion, and it is defined as indefinite rather than permanent, with readmission conditions possible. Whether NYU uses “expulsion” as a separate term elsewhere, and whether a degree can be revoked, are not documented in this bulletin and we will not assert either way.

The same is true of transcript notation. Nothing in these rules says whether a sanction is recorded on a transcript, or for how long. That is a question to put to the CAS Associate Dean for Students, not one to answer from a web page.

For context, the offence definitions themselves are broad and old. The Arts and Science Statement on Student Discipline says academic disciplinary offences “include but are not limited to: cheating, plagiarism, falsification of data or sources and forgery”, and that misconduct covers “plagiarism, cheating, and possession of or use of any prohibited notes, reference resources, or data processing or other devices in any class or examination; and forgery of academic documents in attempt to defraud”. It closes with a warning about the top of the scale: students who fail to maintain these values “will be subject to academic disciplinary sanction, which may include dismissal from the University”.

And the College Honor Code is a pledge you make in the first person: “As a student in the College, I pledge that: I shall perform honestly all my academic obligations. I will not represent the words, works, or ideas of others as my own; will not cheat; and will not seek to mislead faculty or other academic officers in their evaluation of my course work or in any other academic affairs.”

The rules do not mention AI

A full-text search of the CAS/GSAS academic-policies bulletin for “artificial intelligence”, “generative”, “ChatGPT”, “Turnitin” and “detect” returns zero matches.

That is not surprising once you see the dates. The sanctions definitions were approved on 21 April 2014 and the jurisdictional split is dated 2018. These are pre-AI instruments, and they have not been amended to name it.

Be careful with the one phrase that looks like it might apply. The misconduct definition covers “possession of or use of any prohibited notes, reference resources, or data processing or other devicesin any class or examination”. In 2014 that language was about what you may have in an exam room. It is not an AI clause and should not be read as one.

What this means in practice is that an AI question in CAS is argued through the general concepts — representing the words, works or ideas of others as your own; seeking to mislead faculty in their evaluation of your work — rather than through a specific rule with a specific test. And because the school-level text is silent, your course syllabus is where the actual instruction lives. There is no CAS-wide AI permission or prohibition published here to fall back on.

No disclosure format is prescribed either. If your course does allow AI use and asks you to say so, our AI disclosure statement guide covers what a usable one contains — but ask the instructor for the form they want.

What we could not read

The limits of this page matter more than usual, so here they are plainly.

NYU’s university-level policy page — Academic Integrity for Students at NYU, on www.nyu.edu— returned an empty bot-challenge response on every attempt, as did cas.nyu.edu, gallatin.nyu.edu and the other www.nyu.edu student pages we tried. The NYU Bulletin was reachable, and it is an NYU primary source, which is why this page exists at all.

Blocked is not absent. Those documents are published; we could not retrieve them. So we could not read, and therefore will not describe:

• NYU’s position on AI-writing detection. No statement for or against was retrievable. This is an open question, not a documented silence — do not read this page as saying NYU has no position.
• Whether any similarity or plagiarism tool is used, and if so which. None is named in the bulletin.
• Whether students can check their own work against anything before submitting.
• Whether submitted work is stored in a comparison repository, and whether there is any opt-out.
• Any published case data — no annual count of allegations or findings was retrievable, and we will not quote one.

If any of these matters to you, the answers are very likely readable from inside NYU, or obtainable by asking your instructor or the CAS Associate Dean for Students directly.

One thing we can say from our own side rather than NYU’s. Whatever tool anyone runs, our published error rates are measured on English and German corpora, and no detector — ours included — produces proof. If you write in English as a second language, that is worth holding on to before any conversation about your work.

What to ask, and who to ask

Because the school-level text is silent on AI and the university-level page was unreadable to us, the gap has to be closed by asking. The good news is that the CAS procedure hands you the right people to ask, and it names them.

Your instructor owns the rule that actually binds your work. Ask by email, before you start, and ask something answerable:

• Is generative AI permitted in this course — for any stage of the work, or none?
• If some use is permitted, how would you like it acknowledged, and in what form?
• Do editing, grammar or translation tools count for this purpose? For a second-language writer this is a real question, not a pedantic one.
• Is any similarity or AI-detection tool run on submissions here, and would I see the result?

Ask specifically rather than generally. “May I use AI?” invites a cautious no; “may I use a grammar checker on a draft I wrote myself?” asks something a teacher can answer, and the answer helps you. Keep the reply — a permission you cannot produce later is a permission you did not get.

Your director of undergraduate studies is the person whose assent is required before a substantial finding, who must write to you within seven days, and who conducts the only appeal you get on a grade. Find out who holds the role in your department now, while it costs nothing to look it up.

The CAS Associate Dean for Studentsowns the stage where you get an explicit opportunity to respond, and is the right address for the questions this page could not answer — whether a sanction is recorded on a transcript, for how long a warning’s censure period runs, and what happens after the Committee on Student Discipline.

If you are in GSAS rather than the College, ask your programme what the equivalent route is: the bulletin covers both schools for the jurisdictional split, but the procedural detail above is written in CAS terms, with CAS titles.

Before you submit

• Find the AI rule in your syllabus. The CAS bulletin has none, so the course is where the instruction lives. Treat silence as a reason to ask, not as permission.
• Know your director of undergraduate studies. They must assent to a substantial finding, they write to you within seven days, and they conduct the only grade appeal you get.
• Keep drafts, notes and version history as you write. The grade appeal is final at departmental level, so there is no later stage to introduce evidence.
• Answer a first, informal conversation properly. The rules expressly let an instructor drop an inconclusive matter without a grade reduction.
• Read the seven-day letter for what was actually decided — a grade reduction and a disciplinary sanction are different things, and you should know which one you have.
• Remember a second offence “of any kind” counts. It does not need to resemble the first.

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. It is a second opinion on your writing, not a clearance certificate — see how accurate AI detectors really are.

Sources

• NYU Bulletin, Arts and Science academic policies — the College of Arts and Science Honor Code, the Arts and Science Statement on Student Discipline, the academic-misconduct procedure, the grade appeal, and the sanctions definitions. The page carries no page-level revision date.
• Discipline: Definitions of Sanctions, on the same bulletin page — “Approved by the Faculty of Arts and Science, April 21, 2014”. This is the approving body and date for Warning, Probation, Suspension and Dismissal.
• The academic / non-academic jurisdictional split, on the same page — stated as effective 12 August 2018.
• NYU, Academic Integrity for Students at NYU (www.nyu.edu) — the university-level policy. Not retrievable by us at the time of writing; the host returned an empty bot-challenge response rather than an error, so the document exists and we simply could not read it.

This page is orientation, not legal advice, and it covers the College of Arts and Science and the Graduate School of Arts and Science only. What binds you is the Arts and Science Statement on Student Discipline, the sanctions definitions approved by the Faculty of Arts and Science on 21 April 2014, NYU’s university-level academic integrity policy, and your own course syllabus.