Hi [Student Name],
I need to talk with you about [Assignment Name]. After reviewing your submission, I have concerns about [academic integrity / originality / proper citation].
Specifically: [Brief, factual description of what you observed, for example: "Portions of your response appear to match content from [source]" or "Your answers were nearly identical to another student's."]
Before I take any further steps, I want to hear from you.
Please come see me [during/before/after class] on [date], or reply to this email so we can find a time to meet privately.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Replace the bracketed placeholders with your own details before sending. Save your finished version somewhere easy to find so you can reuse it next year.
How to use this email
When to send it
After you have read the work twice and before you have made up your mind. That gap is narrow, and it is the whole reason this template exists. The job of this email is to get the student into a room with you. It is not to deliver a finding.
Not the night you find it, either. Anything written while you feel personally deceived reads that way the next morning, and a parent may be reading it by then.
What to change before you send
- Describe what you saw; do not name the offense. "The middle three paragraphs match [source] almost word for word" is something you observed. "You plagiarized" is a conclusion, and once it is in writing you own it, even in the version where the student turns out to have an explanation.
- Do not let an AI detector be your evidence. These tools return a probability score, not proof, and they are known to flag work from multilingual students and from students who simply write plainly. If a detector is what made you look twice, say instead what you found in the writing itself: a citation to a source that does not exist, a voice unlike anything they have handed you before.
- Name a private place and a real time. "My room, during fifth period" beats "come find me." A conversation at your desk while the class packs up will be heard as public no matter how quietly you talk.
- Check your handbook before you imply any consequence. Districts differ on who has to be notified, when a family gets a call, and how much of this is your call at all. Learn your process before you send, not after the student asks what happens now.
- Keep the line that leaves you room to be wrong. "Before I take any further steps, I want to hear from you" is doing more work than it looks like.
What a good reply looks like
The range is wide. Some students admit it in the first thirty seconds. Some go silent, and silence is panic far more often than guilt, so do not read it as a confession. Some have a real explanation: a tutor who rewrote it, a study doc the whole group edited, an older sibling who "helped."
Whatever comes back, write down what was said, when, and who was in the room, the same day.
If nothing comes back in a day or two, do not send a second, sharper email. Go get the meeting in person, and loop in your administrator on the timeline your handbook sets.