What a false positive costs you, not just the student
A false positive isn’t free even when it’s resolved fairly. It’s worth knowing what it costs before it happens, so the process accounts for it.
The direct cost: time
A single false positive, handled properly per the five-step process, still takes a meeting, a comparison against baseline work, and a documented outcome. Multiply that across a class set and a busy grading week gets busier.
The indirect cost: trust
A student wrongly flagged and treated as guilty first remembers it for the rest of the course, and often tells classmates. That erodes exactly the assumption of good faith the process depends on for the next student who actually is being checked fairly.
The cost that’s easy to miss: who gets flagged most
Independent research has found non-native English writers and users of formulaic, highly structured writing are disproportionately misclassified by AI detectors generally. If false positives land on the same students repeatedly, that is a pattern worth noticing, not a string of coincidences.
Budgeting for it
Two things reduce the cost without reducing the checking: a short, clear policy — see setting a policy students will actually read — and blocked time for the conversation itself, rather than fitting it between other work.