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Key Takeaway
Most UCLA academic dishonesty cases begin with a professor referral to the Office of Student Conduct. Here's what that referral contains, how it shapes the Reviewer's assessment, and the five steps a student should take the day the notice arrives.
Most UCLA academic dishonesty cases begin the same way: a professor or TA notices something — a suspicious passage, an AI-detection flag, a pattern across two students' submissions, an exam anomaly — and sends a referral to the Office of Student Conduct in the Dean of Students Office. Under the Interim 2026 Student Conduct Code, that referral becomes the opening document of a formal process. Understanding how that referral pipeline works, and what happens between the professor's decision to report and the Office of Student Conduct's first notice to the student, is essential to responding effectively.
Process information current as of April 2026.
Under UCLA policy, an instructor who suspects academic dishonesty is expected to refer the matter to the Office of Student Conduct rather than resolve it purely at the classroom level. In practice, instructors have discretion about timing — some reach out to the student first to discuss, some go straight to the Office of Student Conduct, and some do both in parallel.
If you are having an initial conversation with a professor who has raised concerns about your work, the conversation is not "off the record." Anything you say — including speculative apologies, vague admissions, or explanations that contradict your eventual written response — will likely be summarized and included in the instructor's referral. Preparation matters even at the informal stage.
If you have not yet had the professor conversation and the notice from the Office of Student Conduct has already arrived, the referral is already in.
When an instructor refers a case to the Office of Student Conduct, they typically submit:
The Reviewer takes the referral as a starting point, not a verdict. But the referral frames the case. A well-organized, specific referral is harder to dislodge than a thin one.
The Office of Student Conduct assigns the referral to a Reviewer, who makes an initial assessment of whether the allegation, if supported, would constitute a Code violation. If so, the student receives a notice, usually by email, identifying the allegation and inviting the student to a meeting.
This is the point at which the formal timeline begins for the student. The Interim 2026 Code imposes defined response windows. Missing them narrows your options.
Five steps, in order of urgency.
1. Preserve everything. Save, copy, and back up drafts, research notes, emails with the instructor and classmates, source materials, and any revision history (Google Docs version history, Word track changes, IDE commit history). Do this before you do anything else, and before you edit anything. Evidence that existed on the day of submission is far more credible than evidence reconstructed after the fact.
2. Do not contact the reporting instructor. Appealing to the professor after a referral is in can look like pressure or witness tampering. If there is a reason to communicate, do it through the Office of Student Conduct channel or, better, through your Advisor.
3. Read the notice carefully and identify every deadline. Note the date of the response deadline, the meeting date, and any instructions about written submission. The Interim 2026 Code is specific about timing; compliance matters.
4. Get an Advisor involved immediately. Under the Interim 2026 Code, you may bring one Advisor to any meeting or proceeding, and up to two Support Persons to hearings. The Advisor may advise, but may not speak for you. AdvocatED advisors routinely serve in this role for UCLA students, and the prep work starts from the notice, not from the meeting.
5. Begin drafting your written response. A clear, specific, evidence-backed response to the allegation should be drafted before the meeting, refined with your Advisor, and ready to stand as the core of your position.
AI-generated content submitted without prior instructor approval is explicitly covered under the UCLA Student Conduct Code. AI-use referrals typically include detection-tool output — Turnitin AI reports, GPTZero scores, or similar.
These tools are not dispositive under UCLA's framework, but they carry weight, and students who dismiss them without a substantive counter-explanation rarely fare well. The successful defense usually turns on a documentary backbone: version history showing organic drafting, contemporaneous research notes, chat logs with legitimate study partners, timestamps that line up with a human writing cadence rather than a single sudden appearance of polished text.
If AI was used in a legitimate, policy-compliant way — for brainstorming, for citation formatting, for grammar checking when permitted — that legitimate use should be documented and explained, not hidden. AI-use cases where the student initially denies and later concedes partial use are nearly impossible to recover.
Collaboration referrals usually arrive when two or more students' submissions share suspicious structural or textual similarity. The question the Reviewer is trying to answer is not "did these students talk" but "did the collaboration exceed what the instructor authorized." Preparation turns on the assignment prompt, syllabus language, and documentation of what the students actually did and did not share.
Plagiarism referrals turn on the specific passages flagged and whether citation and attribution match UCLA's standards for the course level. Strong defenses usually include citation-tracking evidence, drafts showing incremental addition of cited material, and an account of how the source was used.
The Reviewer meeting, in most cases, is the decision point. The referral sets the frame; the student's written response and meeting conduct either break that frame or confirm it. Students who wait until the day of the meeting to organize their case are almost always under-prepared relative to what the Interim 2026 Code rewards.
If you've received a notice from UCLA's Office of Student Conduct after an instructor referral, contact AdvocatED as soon as you can. The days between notice and meeting are the most valuable preparation days you will have in the entire process.
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