Plagiarism and AI at UCF: the Z designation and what removes it

The short answer

UCF marks academic misconduct on the transcript itself, with a letter Z in front of your course grade — and grade forgiveness does not remove it. That is the consequence worth understanding before anything else, because it outlasts the grade.

AI is written directly into the regulation as an example of academic misconduct. But UCF’s own guidance also tells faculty not to rely on AI detectors, and the burden of proof sits on the university, not on you.

The Z designation

Most universities record misconduct in an internal file. UCF puts it where an employer or a graduate school can see it:

“A Z designationdenotes a student was found responsible of academic misconduct while enrolled in a course. A Z designation does not affect a student’s grade point average.”

It attaches to the letter grade — “ZA, ZB, ZC, ZD, ZF” — and there is a version for leaving early: “A Z designation will be denoted on the student’s transcript as a ZWif a student withdrew from the course prior to the conclusion of the conduct process and was subsequently found ‘in violation’ of academic misconduct.” Withdrawing does not make the process go away.

It becomes permanent in two situations:

• The punitive sanction was deferred disciplinary suspension, disciplinary suspension, disciplinary dismissal, expulsion, or delayed conferral of degree.
• You are found responsible for academic misconduct twice during your UCF academic career — and here the regulation is blunt that severity is irrelevant: “The punitive sanction received in either academic misconduct case has no bearing on the Z designation being permanently placed on the student’s transcript.” Both courses get one.

Two minor cases, then, are enough. That is the single most useful thing on this page: at UCF, a second finding is categorically different from a first, regardless of how small either was.

There is also an immediate cost: “A Z designation will remove a student from consideration for academic awards and honors (e.g. President’s List and Dean’s List) for the academic semester in which the violation occurred.”

CREED: the only route to removal

Students often assume retaking the course fixes it. The regulation forecloses that in one sentence:

“Students have the opportunity to improve the letter grade recorded […] through the use of grade forgiveness. The Z designation however will still remain on the student’s transcript.”

The one documented route is the Community ReEngagement and Educational Development (CREED) Program, through which “a student can attempt to have a Z designation permanently removed”. Note the word attempt. UCF’s Student Conduct and Academic Integrity office states that “completion of the CREED Program requirements does not automatically guarantee removal of the Z designation.”

The designation has been in force since Fall 2015, with the 2015-2016 Golden Rule.

AI is named in the regulation itself

This matters more than it sounds. At many universities, AI rules live in guidance a committee wrote. At UCF it is in the regulation adopted under Board of Governors authority, effective 10 June 2026:

“Examples of academic misconduct include but are not limited to: plagiarism; unauthorized assistance to complete an academic exercise; unauthorized communication with others during an examination, course assignment, or project; falsifying or misrepresenting academic work; providing misleading information to create a personal advantage to complete course/degree requirements; unauthorized use of artificial intelligence tools; or multiple submission(s) of academic work without permission of the instructor of record.”

The operative word is unauthorized. Authorization comes from your syllabus, and UCF tells students what to do when the syllabus is silent: “Students should look to individual syllabi for guidance on how, when, and if AI use is permitted. If no policy is stated, students should seek clarification from the instructor rather than make assumptions about acceptable use.”

Ask, and keep the reply. It takes a minute and it is the difference between authorized and unauthorized.

Also in the regulation, and easy to trip over: “multiple submission(s) of academic work without permission” — reusing your own earlier work needs permission. And “any student who knowingly helps another violate academic behavior standards is also in violation of the standards.”

The clause about asking for help

This one is unusual enough to flag on its own, because it catches behaviour students do not think of as cheating at all:

“It is considered Academic Misconduct to solicit assistance with academic coursework and/or degree requirements, even if the solicitation did not yield actual assistance (for example, if there was no response to the solicitation).”

Posting your assignment to a homework site or a group chat asking someone to do it is complete as an offence the moment you post it. Nobody has to answer.

The mirror-image rule is about uploading: “Selling of course material to another person and/or uploading course material to a third-party vendor without authorization” is separately listed. And UCF’s AI guidance adds a copyright dimension people rarely consider — “It is a copyright violation to upload intellectual property / copyrighted materials (which includes student assignments, publisher materials, and articles obtained from the UCF library by download) to an AI tool that trains itself or stores such materials.”

That last point is worth taking seriously in general: before you put a draft into any online service, find out whether it keeps it.

What UCF tells its own faculty

If you are ever accused on the strength of a detector score, this is the passage to know. It is published by UCF’s own “AI for All” initiative, under faculty use of AI for teaching:

“Faculty are advised to avoid using AI detectors. They are not reliable and can generate convincing-looking false positives and false negatives. Further, research indicates that students writing in a non-native language are disproportionately likely to be unjustly accused of AI use.”

It is not a stray blog post: the acknowledgements credit UCF IT, UCF Libraries, the Center for Ethics, the Center for Distributed Learning, the Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning, the Faculty Senate IT Committee and the Office of Research. The page carries no publication date, which we note rather than paper over.

The same site is equally direct about one specific product: “The separate Grammarly AI detection product should not be used to ‘catch’ plagiarism.”

Two honest limits. Whether the Turnitin AI indicator is technically switched on inside Webcourses is not publicly documented — the IT knowledge-base article is not readable from outside. And UCF’s teaching centre does name Turnitin for similarity checking, describing it as a tool that “allows faculty to compare student work”, on a page whose material dates to June 2020. No student self-check route is documented.

The same page makes a point we would make about any similarity tool: “tools exist that can automate paraphrasing for students […] so turnitin.com may not catch all plagiarism.” Similarity and authorship are different questions, which is the theme of what a Turnitin score actually means and how accurate AI detectors really are. If you are already in this situation, what to do when you are accused and AI detectors and non-native speakers are the two to read.

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.

Disclosing AI use

UCF publishes both the rule and a worked example:

“The intentional use of AI-assisted tools for any element of a work or school product must be disclosed(example: ‘an outline of topics for this work were generated by Copilot with Enterprise Data Protection, March 7, 2025’). Use of AI that is embedded within larger software (e.g., predictive text sentence completions, auto-correct, spell check, etc.), does not need to be disclosed. Disclosing the use of grammar assistance is not centrally mandated for students, but may depend on individual faculty policy.”

That is a sensible, liveable line: autocorrect and spell check are not disclosable; deliberate use of a tool for part of the work is. Grammar assistance sits in between and depends on your instructor.

And the consequence of getting it wrong is stated in one sentence: “Students who fraudulently represent AI output as their work are committing plagiarism.” Our AI disclosure statement guide has wording that fits UCF’s example format.

One practical note from UCF’s citation guidance: if you cite a shared chat, the chat “will need to be made public in order to share access and retained until the assignment has been graded”. Do not delete the conversation you cited.

Process, proof and appeal

The instructor cannot simply act. They must file an Academic Misconduct Report with the Director of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity before taking academic action, and “upon receipt of an AMR form SCAI has six months to charge a student with a violation of academic misconduct.”

After a preliminary conference there are three routes: dismissal, an informal resolution conference, or a formal hearing. The difference matters enormously:

• Informal resolution is faster and can impose warnings, probation or deferred suspension plus educational sanctions — but “the outcomes from an informal resolution conference process (decision of responsibility and recommended sanctions) are final and are not eligible for appeal.”
• A formal hearing carries the full procedural rights, “including but not limited to timely written notice and the right to an advisor, advocate, or legal representative who can participate in the proceedings”, and its outcome can be appealed.

Choosing the informal route trades your appeal away. If you dispute the finding rather than just wanting it over with, that is a decision to make deliberately.

Now the part most students do not know, quoted in full:

“The Student Conduct Review Process shall be conducted on the basis that the charged student is not responsible until the preponderance of evidence proves otherwise […] The burden of proof is not on the student charged with a violation of the Code of Conduct. The university has the burden to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that a violation has taken place.”

You do not have to prove your innocence. UCF has to prove the violation, on the balance of probabilities. That said, bringing concrete material — drafts, dated version history, notes, the reply from your instructor authorizing a tool — is what makes the case fall apart quickly. See how to prove you wrote it yourself.

Appeal grounds include that “the sanction(s) are extraordinarily disproportionate to the violation(s)”, and filing one pauses the penalty: “The submission of an appeal suspends any sanctions awaiting the outcome of the appeal.”

The sanction ladder itself runs from a written reprimand through disciplinary probation, deferred suspension, suspension, dismissal (“at least two years and up to seven years”), delayed issuance of diploma or conferral of degree, to expulsion, which “permanently separates a student from the University without opportunity to graduate or re-enroll” with a permanent transcript overlay. Suspension and deferred suspension also carry a conduct overlay for their duration.

The numbers UCF publishes

UCF is unusual in publishing conduct statistics at all, so they are worth reporting — with their limits stated.

For 1 August 2019 to 31 July 2020, UCF reported 1,467 reported individual cases and 1,616 assigned educational sanctions. Cases skewed heavily to earlier years of study — freshman 37%, sophomore 23%, junior 20%, senior 16%, graduate 4%. Among punitive sanctions, disciplinary probation accounted for 60%, deferred disciplinary suspension 23%, suspension 8%, warning 7%, dismissal 1% and expulsion 0.2%.

Three caveats we will not leave out:

• These are all conduct cases, not academic misconduct alone. The graphic does not break integrity out separately.
• The most recent published year is 2019-2020. Nothing has been published since, so this predates generative AI entirely.
• They are counts, not rates. Nobody can honestly convert them into a chance of being caught.

What they do show is the shape of outcomes: the overwhelming majority end in probation, and expulsion is vanishingly rare.

Before you submit

• Read the syllabus for the AI rule; if it is silent, ask. UCF tells you to, and “unauthorized” is the word that does the work in the regulation.
• Treat a first finding as serious. A second one makes the Z designation permanent regardless of severity.
• Never post an assignment asking for help. Soliciting is complete even if nobody replies.
• Keep drafts and version history. UCF carries the burden of proof, but concrete evidence ends it fastest.
• Think before choosing informal resolution. It is final and cannot be appealed.

If you want a read on your own text before you hand it in, our AI checkis 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. UCF’s own guidance says the same thing to its faculty.

Sources

• UCF: UCF-5.008 Rules of Conduct — effective 10 June 2026; names unauthorized use of AI tools.
• UCF: UCF-5.015 Student Academic Misconduct Review Process — effective 10 June 2026, adopted 12 June 2025; the Z designation.
• UCF: Responsible AI Use at UCF — the detector advice and the disclosure rule; page carries no date.
• UCF Student Conduct and Academic Integrity: Z Designation for Academic Misconduct and statistics — most recent published year 2019-2020.

This page is orientation, not legal advice. What binds you is your syllabus and the UCF regulations.