Four bodies, four different jobs
People use “the regulator” as though one organisation is in charge here. Four are involved and only one of them will ever look at your individual case.
- Office for Students (OfS) — the statutory regulator for higher education in England. It regulates providers against registration conditions covering quality and standards. It does not adjudicate individual student cases.
- QAA — the sector’s quality body. Publishes advice and reference points. Influential, and binding on nobody.
- Jisc — the sector’s technology body, and where QAA sends readers for the detail on detection.
- OIA — the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. Not a regulator at all: it reviews individual student complaints in England and Wales once a provider’s internal process has finished. This is the one that can look at what happened to you.
What QAA actually says
QAA published Maintaining quality and standards in the ChatGPT era on 8 May 2023. On detection its position is short and worth quoting exactly: where students use these tools, “detecting their use is fraught with difficulty” — an issue it says is explored in a Jisc blogpost, to which it defers.
The advice is not built around catching people. It recommends clear policy, engaging students early, and assessment design, and says that approach “is preferable to trying to ban the use of these tools outright”.
We would like to quote Jisc directly here as well, since QAA points at it. Its published guidance is served behind a protection layer we cannot read from our tooling, and we are not going to quote a document we have not actually read — so this page cites QAA’s own words and QAA’s own pointer, and stops there.
What follows from “nobody requires it”
Two things, if a score is being used against you.
First, “the regulations require us to” is not available. No UK body obliges a provider to run detection, so the decision to buy it, the decision to run it on your work, and the decision about how much it counts are all the institution’s own. They are therefore all questions the institution has to answer.
Second, the sector’s own guidance does not support treating a percentage as proof. A panel leaning on a number is not following an external rule; it is going further than the sector body it takes its reference points from.
Where to take it
In order, and this order matters: your students’ union, then your provider’s internal appeal on the grounds its regulations actually recognise, then the OIA within 12 months of the Completion of Procedures letter. The appeal process in detail sets out what that letter is and why its date is the thing to write down.
Where we stand
We sell a detector and a humanizer, so weigh this page accordingly. It is not legal advice. Everything above is sourced to the bodies’ own published documents, dated, and linked — and where we could not read a source, the page says so rather than paraphrasing someone else’s summary of it.