As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

I&#x27;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 &quot;fake&quot; students. A college had about half her students turn out to be &quot;fake.&quot;<p>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, &quot;Hello, I am a student in [insert city] and I&#x27;m studying...&quot;<p>We had been warned that these &quot;students&quot; 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.

The author tried really hard to dance around the real problem here: California is apparently paying students to attend online community college.<p>If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn&#x27;t be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.

This is an example of what I&#x27;ve been thinking about&#x2F;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.<p>When I&#x27;ve thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it&#x27;s a perfect example: we&#x27;re going to be increasingly unable to know what is &quot;true&quot; in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in every way possible.<p>We&#x27;re headed for bad times, and I don&#x27;t know what the answer is, if there is one.

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.

When I read that title, I was expecting the following story: &quot;Academic ghostwriters&quot;, thanks to AI, are now completing online degrees by the hundreds per actual human headcount, selling the opportunity to put one&#x27;s name on the &quot;work&quot; to fraudulently obtain a degree.

This is so strange. When I was enrolled in college my financial aid was sent directly to the college, I couldn&#x27;t steal it even if I wanted to.

Isn&#x27;t the solution really easy? Make the students show up on the first day in-person, compare.with ID and take a photo.

I&#x27;m surprised to see ID verification isn&#x27;t required apparently (or that&#x27;s being faked as well), that&#x27;s usually required for any kind of program that involves financial aid.

A similar thing has been happening in the UK: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;cy87zjn97epo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;cy87zjn97epo</a>

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.

So is the journalist (and&#x2F;or faculty) misusing the term &quot;bot&quot; to refer to real humans doing fraud? I find it annoying that words get redefined this way. Especially as it feels like it&#x27;s the opposite meaning.

The solution is simple and obvious: mandatory in-person student orientation before classes begin.

Require in-person attendance at least once the first week for those using financial aid.