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

voiceofsandiego.org

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

#111

Post by arp242 »

MisterTea wrote: post #73
HamsterDan wrote: post #22

The 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.

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 primiti…

This type of fraud is not entirely a new thing, e.g. from 2014: https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/pell-grant-fr...

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).

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

#112

Post by jccalhoun »

disambiguation wrote: post #110

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.

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

#113

Post by jccalhoun »

mnky9800n wrote: post #3

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…

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.

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

#114

Post by red-iron-pine »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #65
philipallstar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think virtue signalling is playing to the far right? Care to define... any of your terms?

The concept of virtue signaling does not imply a particular group that the signal is intended for, and absolutely can be for the far right.

hell, the concept comes out of signaling Christian Virtue and taking steps to look holier than thou

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

#115

Post by jccalhoun »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29

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.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

gcanyon wrote: post #31

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 ev…

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by stikit »

floor2 wrote: post #95
stikit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please avoid labels. It’s not unique to the ‘far’ right to want to manage accountability to limited resources like quality education. it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this.

> it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this "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, n…

>>>"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?

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.

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

#118

Post by bell-cot »

SecretDreams wrote: post #96
bell-cot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Full time work while going to school is excessive ... 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.

I mean, I worked 20ish hours a week while doing engineering and I did well relative to my peers, but I can still recognize it was a lot. Full time in that world for 4-5 years would have been miserable. Just because I can do something doesn't mean it's something I would want or would suggest for the rest of the population.

Yes, it is fairly miserable to do both full-time.

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.

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

#119

Post by beej71 »

ethagknight wrote: post #83
RHSeeger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qual…

Can’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”.

One way to lower the bar would be to show up any day before you could collect financial aid.

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

#120

Post by arp242 »

RHSeeger wrote: post #72
skeeks wrote: post #45

Isn't the solution really easy? Make the students show up on the first day in-person, compare.with ID and take a photo.

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 qual…

Presumably we would handle that in the same way we did up until ~5 years ago or so.

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.

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