FOI_25-148 Academic misconduct and misuse of artificial intelligence
Date of response: 27 May 2025
We have now considered your request of 12 May 2025 for the following information:
Question 1. What is your university policy on the use of AI for coursework or graded submissions/exams?
Question 2. Do you have guidance for students on referencing AI if used in coursework or graded submissions/exams?
Question 3. Do you have software that can detect the use of AI in coursework/graded submissions – similar to ones used to check for plagiarism?
Question 4. If you do use AI detection software, what software do you use?
Question 5. What are the penalties if AI is not referenced or recorded correctly in coursework or graded submissions/exams?
Question 6. How many students recorded/referenced the use of AI in coursework/graded submissions/exams in 2022, 2023 and 2024 [stats for each calendar year]?
Question 7. How many students were deemed by the university to have misused AI in coursework or graded submissions/exams in 2022, 2023 and 2024 [stats for each calendar year]?
Question 8. How many students were suspended from the university for misuse of AI in 2022, 2023 and 2024 [stats for each calendar year]?
Question 9. How many students were expelled from the university for misuse of AI in 2022, 2023 and 2024 [stats for each calendar year]?
Our response:
We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.
Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to how many students were deemed by the University to have misused Artificial Intelligence in coursework or graded submissions/exams in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.
'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.
To explain our position, information relating to students facing a formal misconduct investigation due to suspected academic misconduct and the nature of those investigations (whether they involve the misuse of AI) is held within our Learning and Teaching Services division (LTS), however this division does not routinely record the number of academic misconduct cases involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) specifically. There is no sub-categorisation applied to cases of academic misconduct records, which would allow us to clearly separate out those cases involving AI only.
The only way of identifying, extracting, and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual formal misconduct investigation case file manually, to ascertain which cases involved the misuse of Artificial Intelligence in coursework or graded submissions.
We have identified 453 formal misconduct investigations into just one category of academic misconduct; suspected plagiarism and collusion, for the academic year 2023-24 alone, which may fall into the scope of your request.
We have calculated it would take a total of 10 minutes per each student academic misconduct case file, for those held for 2023-24 year alone, or 75.5 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual file. Which exceeds the appropriate time limit as outlined above. Please also note that the University records cases of misconduct by academic year, therefore we would also require time to sort the data held by calendar year as per your request.
To assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we can provide a response to you in full for questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. We can also provide a partial response to questions 8 and 9, which would be the number of students suspended or expelled from the University for breaching Regulation 18 (plagiarism and collusion) of our General Regulations for Students. We can provide this information to you per academic years 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25.
Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.
We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.
We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.