I'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.
Giving 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.
This is the hard part of society. We want nice things but propose anything that can be gamed/scammed for free money and it's instantly shot-down before it even gets off the ground. That, or if by a miracle it launches, is constantly attacked and smeared by politicians using it to get votes from selfish assholes who dont want to share (I learned about sharing in preschool and kindergarten).
Until you solve the primitive animalistic problems of selfishness, greed, and energy conserving laziness, were not going to have nice things. Someone asshole is going to be mad they have to share. Some asshole is going to lie and scam to get as much free shit as they can.
On one hand, students need to pay for food and rent, so it makes sense. I used loans, grants, scholarships, and financial aid to pay for these expenses myself when I was in school.
On the other hand, maybe the barrier to entry is just waaayyy too low for online community college classes for this to make any sense. Students should have some skin in the game. Maybe students should be required to take a couple in person classes before financial aid can be used for online classes?
I don't think the article was dancing around it though.
> 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.
It is important to not deny people what they need in order to prevent fraudsters from profiting. This fraud is roughly 0.3% of total student aide in California.
No such thing as free education. Just subsidized education. Costs would be pushed entirely to tax payers, many of whom have never attended college themselves. Demand, costs, taxes and state deficits would increase. The incentive for fraud would be pushed up one level to the administration.
This 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.
Underlying this is a belief that scamming people is the only way to achieve financial stability, that you need to always be hustling. Teenagers went from idolising actors and musicians (who had agents dealing with the money behind closed doors) to idolising social media creators and influencers who are quite transparent about how the algorithm determines their income. On IndieHackers and MicroConf, it's standard advice that you need to sell your SaaS to businesses because ordinary consumers have no money.
We'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.
Stop 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.
I 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.
> then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education
I get what you mean, but saying that something _should_ be the case in response to not liking it doesn’t really make sense since that’s the reason it’s popular in the first place. States don’t do this, so that’s part of why online schooling is valuable.
I agree that online school isn’t as quality as in person (in my experience), but it gives a ton of flexibility to those who can’t commute (due to time or cost) and allows those people to possibly get an education when they otherwise couldn’t.
I wonder if there’s a formal term for this kind of argument (would love to know because I see it a lot).
I currently have a full time job in government as a computer scientist. I'm also taking an online master's at georgia tech and it's fairly good so far - no other way I could study supercomputing. Why would I leave an AI job where I'm learning practical AI skills to study CS? Async with evening exams was my only option.
If you don't have a broad perspective on all life circumstances and types of education, don't just dismiss what you don't know.
However I believe they do require you to show up for _exams_. Online proctoring is a miserable disaster, especially in the AI era, so I think for credentials it's unfortunately necessary to have in-person exams. (edit: checked and they switched to online during COVID, unsuprisingly, but are considering switching back)
The ease of financial fraud is a separate issue. In the US I suspect that's linked to widespread identity fraud.
When I went to university, the first week we received the syllabus, and date for final examination. Lectures were some old professors pretty much just doing book recitals in a large auditorium - little to no interaction with the students. If you had questions, that's what the TAs were for.
Any actual learning, you had to do in the library or study halls - and hopefully join a reading/study group. But the vast majority of students just showed up to lectures (if that even), and studied the course material on their own.
Pretty much what every large college / university looks like. And to be completely honest, I don't see why that can't be done online. Some of the core classes today have thousands of students at the largest schools.
When I took my MBA at a much smaller (in terms of student mass) school, it was completely different. But that was due to the much smaller number of students, and more professors, who had a much closer connection to the students. For that type of education - and with that type of infrastructure, I do agree that getting people physically to the school can help. But that's more by design.
Like anything it depends on the situation. It works well for some people and subjects but not for others.
Last semester I had a student in my online class that was every tech illiterate. There was an assignment where they were supposed to download a file, fill in the blanks and submit it. This is something that should take no more than 5 minutes. The student couldn't figure out how. I told the student, "you can just print it out then take a picture." Come to find out the student doesn't have a laptop or desktop computer and was trying to do it on a phone. I look at their schedule and they are taking all online courses. That person should not be taking online classes.
This kind of fraud existed even before online college became so popular.
Around 2014-2015 we had to start reporting the “last day of attendance” or participation for any student who failed a course. Kind of a pain when you prefer to treat your university students as adults and not take attendance.
Remote and correspondence (the same thing really) have existed forever. There is zero basis for your statement it’s worse, and there is zero basis for your statement that there is compromise. Remote schooling allows people who wouldn’t have the means to educate themselves formally such as working people, parents, adult learners, etc to do so in a manner practical to them.
I have a degree I got in person and now one I am working on remote. Do you know what the difference is? NOTHING! When I went in person I was making up for the shortcomings of professors too. I was still having to teach myself a lot. The only true difference was I wasn’t able to do more than terrible part time work and I drove 45 minutes one way.
Malware vendors like honorlock have made remote schooling much more difficult. Not in terms of learning but in terms of overall stress level. Remote schooling itself is an incredible way to break from the aristocratic ideal still pedaled by universities today.
I’m envious of students whose parents prepared appropriately for their kids to go to school and focus full time. I was not one of them. My situation made worse by my parents making just enough to disqualify me from any aid despite their contribution of 0. The existence of remote schooling has allowed me to pursue my educational dreams.
Yeah, 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.
When 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.
If 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…
Financial 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.
It 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.
How 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.
This 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.
That might not always work. There is a huge issue of Lyft and Uber drivers showing up the first day, passing all the background checks, etc. then selling their account to someone else to take their place. Maybe better is to show up first day, and to do random ID checks throughout the semester. It feels.. unfriendly and accusatory to do that but I'm not sure of the alternative...
.. but if we wanted to be a little Orwellian.. put cameras and facial recognition in the classrooms to take automatic attendance and to identify students who should not be there, or who may be missing for prolonged absences. That'll go over really well....
I'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.
At 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.
I 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.
Sort 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.
So 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.
Seems 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.
jccalhoun|10 months ago
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|10 months ago
HamsterDan|10 months ago
If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.
gcanyon|10 months ago
MisterTea|10 months ago
Until you solve the primitive animalistic problems of selfishness, greed, and energy conserving laziness, were not going to have nice things. Someone asshole is going to be mad they have to share. Some asshole is going to lie and scam to get as much free shit as they can.
Solving this is a very hard problem.
tschoesi|10 months ago
astura|10 months ago
On the other hand, maybe the barrier to entry is just waaayyy too low for online community college classes for this to make any sense. Students should have some skin in the game. Maybe students should be required to take a couple in person classes before financial aid can be used for online classes?
I don't think the article was dancing around it though.
insane_dreamer|10 months ago
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.
foxyv|10 months ago
YeahThisIsMe|10 months ago
It's just not reasonable when they're not even traveling to the office.
stikit|10 months ago
gcanyon|10 months ago
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.
cjs_ac|10 months ago
disambiguation|10 months ago
Wouldn't having class in person be a sure way to know?
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
Geezus_42|10 months ago
crazygringo|10 months ago
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.
mnky9800n|10 months ago
haswell|10 months ago
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.
jjice|10 months ago
I get what you mean, but saying that something _should_ be the case in response to not liking it doesn’t really make sense since that’s the reason it’s popular in the first place. States don’t do this, so that’s part of why online schooling is valuable.
I agree that online school isn’t as quality as in person (in my experience), but it gives a ton of flexibility to those who can’t commute (due to time or cost) and allows those people to possibly get an education when they otherwise couldn’t.
I wonder if there’s a formal term for this kind of argument (would love to know because I see it a lot).
zulban|10 months ago
If you don't have a broad perspective on all life circumstances and types of education, don't just dismiss what you don't know.
pjc50|10 months ago
However I believe they do require you to show up for _exams_. Online proctoring is a miserable disaster, especially in the AI era, so I think for credentials it's unfortunately necessary to have in-person exams. (edit: checked and they switched to online during COVID, unsuprisingly, but are considering switching back)
The ease of financial fraud is a separate issue. In the US I suspect that's linked to widespread identity fraud.
TrackerFF|10 months ago
When I went to university, the first week we received the syllabus, and date for final examination. Lectures were some old professors pretty much just doing book recitals in a large auditorium - little to no interaction with the students. If you had questions, that's what the TAs were for.
Any actual learning, you had to do in the library or study halls - and hopefully join a reading/study group. But the vast majority of students just showed up to lectures (if that even), and studied the course material on their own.
Pretty much what every large college / university looks like. And to be completely honest, I don't see why that can't be done online. Some of the core classes today have thousands of students at the largest schools.
When I took my MBA at a much smaller (in terms of student mass) school, it was completely different. But that was due to the much smaller number of students, and more professors, who had a much closer connection to the students. For that type of education - and with that type of infrastructure, I do agree that getting people physically to the school can help. But that's more by design.
jccalhoun|10 months ago
Last semester I had a student in my online class that was every tech illiterate. There was an assignment where they were supposed to download a file, fill in the blanks and submit it. This is something that should take no more than 5 minutes. The student couldn't figure out how. I told the student, "you can just print it out then take a picture." Come to find out the student doesn't have a laptop or desktop computer and was trying to do it on a phone. I look at their schedule and they are taking all online courses. That person should not be taking online classes.
cvwright|10 months ago
Around 2014-2015 we had to start reporting the “last day of attendance” or participation for any student who failed a course. Kind of a pain when you prefer to treat your university students as adults and not take attendance.
ohgr|10 months ago
zer8k|10 months ago
I have a degree I got in person and now one I am working on remote. Do you know what the difference is? NOTHING! When I went in person I was making up for the shortcomings of professors too. I was still having to teach myself a lot. The only true difference was I wasn’t able to do more than terrible part time work and I drove 45 minutes one way.
Malware vendors like honorlock have made remote schooling much more difficult. Not in terms of learning but in terms of overall stress level. Remote schooling itself is an incredible way to break from the aristocratic ideal still pedaled by universities today.
I’m envious of students whose parents prepared appropriately for their kids to go to school and focus full time. I was not one of them. My situation made worse by my parents making just enough to disqualify me from any aid despite their contribution of 0. The existence of remote schooling has allowed me to pursue my educational dreams.
lukan|10 months ago
stakhanov|10 months ago
causality0|10 months ago
BirAdam|10 months ago
ourmandave|10 months ago
I'm sure they apply for the maximum amount which are supposed to be used on school related expenses, etc.
astura|10 months ago
gedy|10 months ago
skeeks|10 months ago
RHSeeger|10 months ago
- 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.
skeeter2020|10 months ago
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.
FrustratedMonky|10 months ago
When really the discussion should be around how bots have become good enough to pass as students. And what can we do about verification.
Molitor5901|10 months ago
.. but if we wanted to be a little Orwellian.. put cameras and facial recognition in the classrooms to take automatic attendance and to identify students who should not be there, or who may be missing for prolonged absences. That'll go over really well....
Cthulhu_|10 months ago
jccalhoun|10 months ago
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.
red020|10 months ago
[deleted]
macleginn|10 months ago
disambiguation|10 months ago
jccalhoun|10 months ago
Last semester was the first time I encountered it and I was suspicious and then I talked to a colleague who noticed identical irregularities.
netsharc|10 months ago
dheatov|10 months ago
34679|10 months ago
stikit|10 months ago