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As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond
- causality0 1y agoThis is so strange. When I was enrolled in college my financial aid was sent directly to the college, I couldn't steal it even if I wanted to.
- gedy 1y agoIt does afaik so I'm confused what the monetary scam is. Community College in California is cheap or free for most students so I feel like something is being left out of the explanation.
- redczar 1y agoStudent loans are usually for more than tuition and books. Part of the loan money is for living expenses.
- gedy 1y agoIf someone is able to first scam state and financial aid for a non existent student that seems more first issue to fix than at the point there's a bot/scammer in CC classes submitting AI homework.
- BirAdam 1y agoIf you get a Pell grant or other “non-traditional” financial aid packages, there’s a bit for associated costs. It’s not huge money, but if you do this scheme across many schools…
- ourmandave 1y agoThe scammers enroll and even submit AI generated homework for 3 weeks until the excess aid funds are distributed to they're fake checking accounts. I'm sure they apply for the maximum amount which are supposed to be used on school related expenses, etc.
- themaninthedark 1y agoHow do we have fake bank accounts with KYC? It should be easy to follow the money.
- astura 1y agoFinancial aid is sent directly to the college. However, if you have a positive balance in your account (financial aid, grants, scholarships, or loans more than tuition and fees) you can request the bursar deposit that balance into your bank account. This is how I paid for living expenses in the years I lived off campus.
- mnky9800n 1y agoStop offering online classes and expect students to show up in person. Online education sucks, everyone knows this. Everyone knows that they are making some kind of compromise when teaching or taking an online course. And if people are too poor to drive themselves to college or have to work too much or whatever else, then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education. Stop accepting less than this.
- haswell 1y agoI grew up in a very conservative and controlling environment. My ability to study remotely is one of the things that helped lift me out of that environment. I am far from alone in this experience. I’d have much preferred an in-person education. But I don’t think we should look at the situation as “A is better than B so let’s get rid of B”. B still serves an important purpose and eliminating it will leave people behind.
- lukan 1y agoYeah, they once told my wife this "expect students to show up in person", when she was pregnant and not all the time well. The result? Thrown out of the self paid language course at university with no refund.
- jccalhoun 1y agoI'm a prof at a community college and I encountered this last semester. I was teaching an online class of 30 and 3-4 were definitely "fake" students. A college had about half her students turn out to be "fake." Students had to do discussion board posts and these students responses all had html formatting as if they were indented replies from an email chain. The clincher was one of them posted in the introduction message board, "Hello, I am a student in [insert city] and I'm studying..." We had been warned that these "students" were coming because we are part of a system of schools and the schools earlier in the alphabet had encountered it in the semesters before us. So the school had contracted with some id verification system and those students got kicked out pretty quickly.
- apothegm 1y agoWhat’s the point of sending a fake student to a community college? What’s the end goal of the people running these bots?
- UncleMeat 1y agoFinancial aid fraud.
- nonethewiser 1y agoHow are they able to profit off that? Doesnt the school cost money which the aid would just reimburse?
- weard_beard 1y agoThey don't pay the school.
- UncleMeat 1y agoTuition aid mediated through a school's financial office is not the only form of aid.
- wildzzz 1y ago
- HamsterDan 1y agoThe author tried really hard to dance around the real problem here: California is apparently paying students to attend online community college. If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago> apparently paying students to attend online community college No, they provide student aid that covers some (it's not much) of low income students' living expenses so that they can actually study and get through college, instead of working fulltime and it taking 2-3 times as long. It's the same type of financial aid scholarships 4-year universities give out too, and in most/all States.
- tschoesi 1y agoRight below the title "fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds". Where's the dancing?
- gcanyon 1y agoGiving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.
- brainwad 1y agoWell, the problem is obvious in hindsight, and perhaps even in foresight. Giving out free money attracts these scammers, who crowd real students out of not only the aid money, but also the actual class. So the net effect is to make it harder to access community college, not easier. Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to avoid the scammers if they limited first time students to in-person classes.
- philipallstar 1y agoThis is the first-order, emotional reaction, yes, but policy should be made based on its full effects, not just its sales pitch's popularity with first-order-emoting voters.
- stakhanov 1y agoWhen I read that title, I was expecting the following story: "Academic ghostwriters", thanks to AI, are now completing online degrees by the hundreds per actual human headcount, selling the opportunity to put one's name on the "work" to fraudulently obtain a degree.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI'm surprised to see ID verification isn't required apparently (or that's being faked as well), that's usually required for any kind of program that involves financial aid.
- red020 1y ago[dead]
- jccalhoun 1y agoAt my community college we are increasingly teaching high school kids. I have taught students who were not of voting age and didn't have a drivers license. That being said, we have contracted with an id verification service to randomly ask some students to verify especially if we think they are "fake" students in online classes.
- macleginn 1y agoA similar thing has been happening in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87zjn97epo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87zjn97epo
- gcanyon 1y agoThis is an example of what I've been thinking about/warning about for several years now: we are entering a post-truth era, where there is increasingly no way to know what is real and what is not. When I've thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it's a perfect example: we're going to be increasingly unable to know what is "true" in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in every way possible. We're headed for bad times, and I don't know what the answer is, if there is one.
- Geezus_42 1y agoI'd say we are already in those bad times you predict.
- crazygringo 1y agoWe've been in a post-truth era for all of human history, since the first hunter-gatherer told a lie to take advantage of someone else. Which is why we evolved to have exquisite bullshit detectors. They're not perfect, but they're pretty decent. The answer around what is real and not is the same as it ever was -- does information come from a respected, generally trustworthy source or not? Does it come from a source that might have an agenda, or not? Is it written in a way that seems to gather a lot of evidence in all directions and then explain its conclusion in a plausible way, or is it clearly one-sided? Bullshit detection, fraud detection, scam detection -- these have always been necessary skills in the world. Sure the scale of misinformation grows, but so do the tools we have to combat it. Email spam was a huge problem, then Gmail filtered it out. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- 1y ago
- stikit 1y agoRequire in-person attendance at least once the first week for those using financial aid.
- skeeks 1y agoIsn't the solution really easy? Make the students show up on the first day in-person, compare.with ID and take a photo.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoYeah, the discussion has devolved into "why are we paying kids to go to school, let them eat dirt like I did growing up". When really the discussion should be around how bots have become good enough to pass as students. And what can we do about verification.
- skeeter2020 1y agoThis only adds a small amount of friction. Some more effective options off the top of my head: 1. free classes but no aid 2. pay covered costs directly 3. tie aid to participation (not performance) You could argue someone could still scam the system by attending the class and submiting AI-generated content or just copying others, but this is much more involved. Some of the blame has to land on the distance programs of the institutions. They've become overly relient on charging full tuition for much cheaper online delivery, and don't care too much about the "community" part of college anymore.
- RHSeeger 1y agoHow do you handle students that are not capable of showing up on the first day in-person? - Live far away - Have a job they can't just not show up for - Having children to take care of - Health issues There's tons of reasons for people not to be able to attend in person, and not all of them are "because I didn't want to". And, for a _lot_ of those people, improving their education can have a huge impact on their quality of life.
- disambiguation 1y agoFor special cases, the committee can come to you!
- ethagknight 1y agoCan’t show up for one day? That is such an incredibly low bar to also ask them to sit through a long series of courses and test. These college colleges are state funded, so if the person is overseas or on the opposite side of the US… then what are we really funding? That’s not the intent of a “community college”.
- netsharc 1y agoSo is the journalist (and/or faculty) misusing the term "bot" to refer to real humans doing fraud? I find it annoying that words get redefined this way. Especially as it feels like it's the opposite meaning.
- dheatov 1y agoSeems like the fake students are automation scripts written to mimic human interaction in online class, pretty much the common definition of "bot"? For now, all bot is still in someway human-operated anyway.
- 34679 1y agoThe solution is simple and obvious: mandatory in-person student orientation before classes begin.
- disambiguation 1y agoI wonder if there are perverse incentives preventing this from being fixed. The financial aid program looks like a success issuing more funds, the schools see increased enrollment, and the fraudsters go without saying. Seems like a win-win-win.
- jccalhoun 1y agoSort of. As a professor who has encountered this, on one hand if I have fewer papers to grade then I'm happy but on the other hand the "students" do submit work for at least the first couple weeks that I still had to grade. (After that we caught on and got them out of the class). Additionally, I would rather just grade good papers than try to figure out why their work seemed weird. Is it AI generated? A non-native english speaker? Good old fashioned plagiarism? or just bad work? Last semester was the first time I encountered it and I was suspicious and then I talked to a colleague who noticed identical irregularities.