It runs to about four pages and you have never read it
Every institution publishes one and it is easier to locate than students assume. Search your school's site for academic integrity, or open the student handbook and find the chapter with honesty or misconduct in its title. Graduate programs often publish a second, stricter document specific to your own school within the university.
Read both once, properly. Twenty minutes, and it removes an anxiety a great many students live with for years without ever resolving. What people fear is almost always vaguer and larger than what the document says, and the document is the only version that counts on the day anything goes wrong.
Read for the verbs, not the headings
Headings are generic across institutions and tell you very little. The phrases that reveal where your own school actually stands are these, and they repay reading twice wherever they turn up.
- Submit as your own: the phrase defining the offence, and the hinge everything else hangs on
- Unauthorised assistance: deliberately vague, and usually clarified by examples further down the page
- Substantive contribution: the point at which help with your writing stops counting as help
- Must be your original work: check whether that is qualified anywhere, and how
- With the permission of the instructor: the sentence converting a grey area into a permitted one
- Any exception list: tutoring, collaboration or writing-centre support named as acceptable
Ask in writing, and ask well
The single most useful sentence available to a graduate student is an email to their instructor describing exactly what help they are considering and asking whether it is permitted. Nobody sends it, because it feels like a confession. It is not. It is the mechanism the policy itself directs you toward.
Frame it around the activity rather than around a service. I am considering having someone review my draft for structure and clarity before submission, without altering my argument. Is that acceptable for this assignment? That gets answered. A vague question about whether help is allowed earns a vague reply, which leaves you precisely where you began.
What we will not do, and why the list is short
We do not sit exams for people. We do not log into anybody's school account. We do not produce work that a program has required to be unaided and that would then be handed in as such. Those refusals cost us business most weeks and they are not negotiable here.
What we do instead is coach, plan, explain, review, and absorb the repetitive layer of a term so the assessed work gets the hours it needs. That distinction is the entire business, which is why the first honest conversation is about what you actually need rather than about a package. Any service that will not state plainly where it stops has answered your question about it.
The grey area is smaller than the worry around it
Nearly everything students privately agonise over, a tutor, a proofreader, a study group, a statistician, somebody reading a draft and telling them what a rubric would say, is explicitly permitted almost everywhere and frequently provided by the university itself at no cost.
The genuinely prohibited category is narrow and unambiguous: handing in as your own something you did not produce. Between those two sits a thin band that varies by institution and sometimes by instructor, and that band is exactly what the email above resolves. Twenty minutes of reading and one message close nearly all of it permanently.
Questions people actually ask.
Where is my school's policy actually kept?
Search the institution's website for academic integrity, or open the student handbook and find the chapter on honesty or misconduct. Graduate schools frequently issue a stricter version of their own, so look for both. If neither surfaces, your program administrator will send it, and asking raises no flags whatsoever.
Will asking my instructor draw attention to me?
No, and that fear is the main reason nobody asks. Instructors read a question about what is permitted as conscientiousness, because that is what it is. The version that genuinely draws attention is help taken quietly and discovered afterwards, which is a far worse conversation than the one you are currently avoiding.
Does using a tutor need to be disclosed?
Usually not, since tutoring is permitted essentially everywhere and most universities fund it themselves. Disclosure becomes relevant where somebody has contributed to the artefact rather than to your understanding of it. If you are unsure which side a particular arrangement falls on, that is exactly the question to put in an email.
My program restricts AI. Does that include grammar checkers?
Frequently not, though policies vary enough that guessing is unwise. Many now distinguish tools that correct what you have already written from tools that generate text for you, permitting the first while prohibiting the second. Read your program's own wording rather than the university's general statement, since the specific one governs.
What will you not take on?
Sitting an exam for somebody, using anyone's school login, and producing work a program has required to be unaided that would then be handed in as such. We decline those weekly. Everything else we do, the planning, the coaching, the review, the repeating weekly layer, is described plainly before anybody pays for anything.
