As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond
voiceofsandiego.org
voiceofsandiego.org
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.
I assume that one person is running accounts for multiple "students" and from the boiler plate that one person submitted I wouldn't be surprised if it was an organized business like many internet/phone scams.
If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.
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.
The matter at hand, specifically, is one about how our ability to verify is overwhelmed by our ability to generate content.
This is playing out with recruitment, bug reports, complaint forms - and going all the way up to sophisticated fraud.
Anti-education movements may be a third order effect for this, but it's a first order effect for other groups who are deliberately pushing anti-education efforts.
The threat of its efficacy, is why, since 1960 onwards, a large chunk of the western world has been figuring out how to bend psychology, rhetoric, and media forces to undermine "Ivory tower" intellectuals.
Yes, a succesful movement has been undermined because it posed a threat to people with the money to spend to fight their battles.
This is old news.
I was able to get educated with full focus on that task, because my family prioritised saving for my education. I want others, without such privilege, to have access to such opportunity.
If you choose to frame it also that "your parents paid you to consume free education", then so be it. But let's not pretend the state is doing something strange or against its core mission here
This is also a sales pitch, playing to the far-right. (virtue signaling)
"Virtue Signaling" is often a term of derision placed from the right onto the left. But is often done just as much on the other side. It's part of the 'right's vocabulary of labels for the left.
I just like to point out all the times when the 'right' take part in "virtue signaling".
Right wing , political or religious, often take part in "virtue signaling". Yet, seem unconscious of it, un-ware of their own biases, because to them they are not 'signaling' they are just speaking 'truth'.
But of course, they are not. "God is real, hence I'm not just 'signaling' when I say it to my fellow believers".
"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Sometimes the reactions on this site are silly. We're talking about community college here. The people going to community college are trying to transition their life from minimum wage retail job to useful careers as things like dental hygienists, nurses, IT workers and daycare workers.
Their own increased future earnings will offset the subsidies through higher taxes and reduced burden on social services, and everyone in society benefits by having people in the types of jobs that community colleges prepare students for.
Community colleges are just a massive benefit to society at large, regardless of whether you're leftwing, rightwing, rich, poor, young or old. Literally everyone is benefiting here.
Off the top of my head, so may not align exactly with formal definitions, but economics is the study of allocation of resources and how incentives play a large role in how human behavior is influenced by those incentives. I prefer Sowell for a primer but if he’s not to your liking try google, keywords economic incentives and resource allocation.
i have plenty of personal experience with community colleges and those close to me have gone from penniless immigrant to making more than the average tech bro because they attended one while working full time, and paying full tuition without aid. what kept them going was a reasonable roi . the i was their investment of hard earned dollars that they used to pay for their tuition and gave them the incentive to stay in. they had skin in the game so they endured. getting something for free doesn’t instill any obligation, and that’s a common lived experience.
But using student debt, as an incentive to study hard, as justification that debt is good, is bit of a stretch.
There are plenty of students that do well without pressure.
Programs that are trying to pull in people on the fence will inevitably have some that don't make it, the goal is for a net positive. If local employers have 1 extra qualified employee at the cost of 2 or 3 that don't make it, it still balances out. The state is out the money for a few tuitions for students that didn't make it, but the lifetime earnings of the one that made it is greater.
Working while going to school is not uncommon or isolated to California. Full time work while going to school is excessive - but that is also a California COL issue that the state needs to actually tackle. But it gets worse the more they don't address their deficits. Debt begets debt and it always drives up COL.
For a healthy, driven person, without other major responsibilities (or a time-sucking internet addiction)? No, it really is not excessive.
And that's assuming that "going to school" is also full time. Taking just one or two classes per term is an old tradition at community colleges.
Not for people fresh out of high school. You are usually trying to graduate with a Bachelor's in 4 years so you do full-time at community college for 2 years to get your AA-T and then transfer to a university for your last 2 years. California in particular has a program that lets you transfer get a guaranteed transfer to any state university or participating private university once you get your AA-T.
Just because I can do something doesn't mean it's something I would want or would suggest for the rest of the population.
OTOH, life in America is very unfairly miserable for tens of millions of people who are not going to school. And trying to tell all the taxpayers that they have to provide nice quality-of-life upgrades, for people who are already enjoying taxpayer-supported free classes? NO - in our non-utopian world, where money is real, that is a very bad idea.
My wife got her Masters from Harvard recently through online classes, and every class had...I want to say about 4 hours a week of actual scheduled, synchronous class sessions over Zoom, in addition to the coursework required.
Community college is explicitly to help local students who are generally working jobs, so these onerous scheduled sessions are not reasonable
> 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.
I think the idea would be if someone's getting paid to go to school so they don't have to work, then they should go to in-person classes. Online classes probably shouldn't be an option.
If there's profit available and no personal cost (in either time or money), scammers will exploit the program as described ("fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds").
We all understand the context of words here. Believe it or not, many people think that the government providing things for its citizens via taxation is a good thing.
What points? You just insist that this is bad and that's the end of it.
It's just not reasonable when they're not even traveling to the office.
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.
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.
But the numbers mentioned there seem tiny for a federal programme like the Pell Grant. A lot of times it's a matter of scale: a bit of fraud isn't ideal, but entirely manageable, so whatever.
Since then the scale expanded greatly. This is often a problem when you move things online: you're instantly connected with everyone on the world, which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.
The solution is to do less things online and more in person. There are some advantages for some people in doing things online, but it also negatively affects everyone, and in general it just doesn't seem worth it to do everything online. It's not binary: you can do many things online while still requiring some bits in-person (e.g. registration, exams, occasional events).
Technology always seems to be the solution until the tables are turned.
> The solution is to do less things online and more in person.
And then we go right back to these programs being attacked for being inaccessible by e.g. poor people and the disabled. Obviously the solution is to hire people to go out and bring these services to those who need it but once you see how much effort is required to do that it rapidly requires a lot of funding and looks inefficient.
A cultural shift is required to fix all this and I am not sure how that will happen. Even given that the major religion in the west is Christianity which preaches that being selfish is not cool has been appropriated by selfish assholes who vote selfishly. I dunno what to say anymore. I am 100% for these programs which will be massively beneficial for humanity and all these fucks can think of is "muh tax munney."
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.
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.
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.
(not a joke)
The number of MAGA voters really strains the credibility of this one.
Wouldn't having class in person be a sure way to know?
That said, there are tremendous advantages to supporting remote learning. Simply requiring in person has far greater costs than are being described in the source article.
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.
Without that there's no lawsuit.
Edit: not sure about Germany
But in the US, colleges have offices for accommodations. The faculty isn't required to do anything unless the university, acting through that office, tells them to.
Source: my career spent working with this kind of institution and this kind of office.
The school should have had information about that in the syllabus.
Either way, with appropriate accommodations, in person classes can be flexible as well.
And yes, we likely could have sued, but we kind of were quite busy with everything else required to start a family.
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).
If you want a case and point of this, imagine a comedian proposing this idea dripping with sarcasm and clever little jokes, sort of what John Oliver does. The overall absurdity would be obvious, and everyone would understand the suggestion is a bad idea, with a little bit of honey to go with the vinegar.
The people often presenting this sort of unintentionally ironic argument don't seem to recognize the idiocy or exclusivity of the thing they're suggesting. Lacking understanding of the absurdity of the situation is the definition of their ignorance, because the burden of understanding and proof are on the person presenting the argument, not the audience. (Everyone is ignorant in some way, and nobody is even close to knowing everything. You're being dramatic if you really think that way, even for a second.)
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.
If you just wanna learn stuff online, dive in and watch YouTube or any of the variety of online educstional services, but in reality you want a certification that says you did the work, and maybe the actual transfer of knowledge is secondary. We shouldn’t pretend that credentials should be handed out for watching YouTube videos and filling out tests with Google searches, group chats sharing answers, or now, AI.
The goal of any credentialing system shouldn’t be to lower the bar as low as possible; you just devalue the whole system. There are several major institutions, formerly reputable, that many will not hire job prospects from.
In other words… Community college should be a bit of a grind, one that produces students who are far more knowledgeable than when they started the program.
The fact that public colleges are a credentialing system is (supposed) to be in pursuit of the above; not the end goal. If we can find ways to help them achieve the above that doesn't actually need credentialing, that should be fine, too. I don't know if that's possible (or even a goal); but it's important to be able to distinguish between the actual goal and what we're trying to do (atm) to achieve them.
I am sure there will be someone who will say, but I liked studying alone. Yes, I agree with you. Pursuit of knowledge by yourself is an important skill to have and a time that is meant to be enjoyed. And what I say to you is this, creating knowledge with others is also a time to be enjoyed and if you miss out on that you are missing out on some of the understanding your books cannot provide. And I would welcome you to work on teams which give you the opportunity to work in this fashion and see if you enjoy it. Because I found that I really do and I want to share that with others.
Every accredited online course program requires proctoring. To think in person stops cheating is naive. We need to rethink how education works if people feel the need to cheat so much. I’ll give you a hint: when people pay 5,000 dollars a class they’re going to cheat because they’re financially incentivized to do so. Administrative bloat in university needs to be done away with immediately and costs of education fixed by the government to some number that is reasonable for most people. Education should not be for-profit. Right now it is, even at public universities.
Every accredited online course program requires proctoring.
You are wrong.
Your logic is quite bad too. The response to the statement that there is massive amounts of cheating in online courses shouldn’t be: “there is cheating in face-to-face courses too”. Obviously what matters are the relative rates of cheating and you’ve not provided any evidence or reasoning as to why the rates are comparable.
To think in person stops cheating is naive.
Obviously. And I never stated or implied that there is no cheating in face-to-face courses.
* taught mostly via online videos; impossible to ask questions on the spot or explore concepts
* interaction with peers and professors is almost entirely forced or inorganic and often terrible
* limited networking options; no real community; hard to build bridges and get references when your professor is an automated test system (i.e. Canvas, et al)
* often limited screening; U Phoenix or WGU takes anyone, and now I have 100+ semi-literate applicants who somehow pulled a 3.3 via online schools blowing up my applications
* difficult to assess value proposition; you generally need to register to take part, while I can just drive to VA Tech or Dartmouth or even the Naval Academy and walk around and see (mostly) what it's like
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.
After that, I worked at GaTech where one of my responsibilities was helping to build the physics portion of the masters program that you are currently in (i don't think the physics portion ever turned into a master program like OSMCS, i left around the time OSMCS started offering degrees). When building these courses we tried to implement the best information from cognitive science and education, we tried to build the best exercises, we had super active involvement in course forums, etc. We did everything right, and we still felt that something was missing from the experience from the teaching side and we did not find that students in the online side participated in the same ways, or learned the same information, as those on-campus. I still believe that most people would benefit more from in person educational experiences. I think your experience in the gatech program is a valuable one and I have heard many positive things about this program since I left to go and do other stuff. However, I still believe that there is something valuable from most educational programs being offered in person only.
1) full-time in-person education, quitting my CS job
2) full-time online education, quitting my CS job
3) full-time CS job and doing a part-time master's online
Option #3 is the best for my CS education and growth. Period. Don't pretend the only choices are #1 and #2 because you're arguing in favour of #1.
Plus, it's not like I can (or want to) move to the USA just for studies. I have family in Montreal. Montreal has great universities for CS and AI but they have almost nothing for supercomputing or quantum computing.
I was a teacher for 4 years. I get it. There's magic to in-person education. But millions of people think online is the better choice for them and they're not all wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure they apply for the maximum amount which are supposed to be used on school related expenses, etc.
It should be easy to follow the money.
When really the discussion should be around how bots have become good enough to pass as students. And what can we do about verification.
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.
- 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.
A single mother than works at Walmart and another job delivering food, trying to support her kid(s), and will get let go if she misses a day at work; who is desperately trying to better herself so she can provide a better future for her family?
Look, I get that it's a balance between stopping the cheaters and not putting undue burden on the good ones. But it's not a simple problem, and there's a lot of people out there that are under constraints that a lot of us wouldn't even consider when trying to work out the solution.
It looks like the main issue is that the people committing the fraud are able to create student profiles and request student aid with these profiles. I am unsure of California's requirements but this generally requires a SSN. California is issuing Real ID so verification should be relatively easy.
Right now people can't enrol in "full" classes either, except the classes are "full" of bots.
And a single day of attendance is really not a very high bar to meet. For special cases where it's really a problem accommodations can be made on request.
.. 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....
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.
Last semester was the first time I encountered it and I was suspicious and then I talked to a colleague who noticed identical irregularities.