The Battle Against Bot Students
Across the country, community colleges are facing a growing threat never faced before: bots. And not the kind of bot that answers customer service calls, but fake “students” who enroll in online classes to steal financial aid funds. The threat is reaching crisis levels.
At Southwestern College in California, professor Elizabeth Smith watched her class roster swell to capacity — only to discover, weeks later, that most of her students were not real. She expected a class of 100 students; on the first day, only 15 people showed up. This disheartening and infuriating experience is, sadly, becoming all too common.
What do these bot students want to achieve? Simply this: to get enrolled, stay in long enough to receive federal or state financial aid, then vanish. Behind the scenes, real individuals manage entire networks of fake identities, using AI tools to submit just enough classwork to fly under the radar. Community colleges, as open-access institutions, are especially vulnerable.
College faculty across the U.S. are finding themselves on the frontlines of this new form of fraud. Instead of focusing on teaching and giving attention to hardworking students, they’re spending valuable hours working as detectives, parsing through AI-generated emails and identifying odd enrollment patterns, trying to filter real students from fake ones. Professors report receiving hundreds of suspicious requests to add a course, filled with robotic language like, “I kindly request admission to your esteemed class.”
This issue is more than annoying — it’s actively harming education. When bots clog up class rosters, real students can’t get into the courses they need. And by the time teachers are able to drop the fake students, it’s often too late for others to join. Then there’s the emotional toll. Professors describe the unearthly feeling of having to ask students, “Are you real?” The trust that’s central to an effective student-teacher relationship is being eroded.
In California, community colleges have begun cracking down, with schools forming task forces and requiring students to verify their identities in person. But these local patches do not address a growing, nationwide problem. Community colleges, often the only option for working adults, first-generation students, and countless others trying to better their lives, need help implementing back-end solutions that root out bots before they even get in the virtual door. Let’s keep the door open for these serious students—and keep out the bots.
Source: The Hechinger Report
https://hechingerreport.org/as-bot-students-continue-to-flood-in-community-colleges-struggle-to-respond/
Image credit: PowHERful / OpenAI