Tired: Teachers using tools to find students cheating with AI.

Wired: Teachers using tools to figure out how many of their new students are bots who are just there to submit enough AI-completed assignments that they can claim financial aid in someone else's name.

This story from the Voice of San Diego is worth a read:

"When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before. "

"By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, she’d concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots."

"The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud."

"That has put teachers on the front lines of an ever-evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students’ ability to access courses. What has made the situation at Southwestern all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven’t done enough to curb the crisis."

https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/04/14/as-bot-students-continue-to-flood-in-community-colleges-struggle-to-respond/

@briankrebs 🤯

@briankrebs

Brave new world....

@briankrebs

Just automating what happened in real life.

I usually "lost" 1/4 to 1/3 of class after the financial aid cut off period... about 3 weeks in...

Some would show up for part of 1st class, then skipped until those couple of cutoff classes- to get marked as attended.

#Fraud

@briankrebs this is why we can't have nice things

@briankrebs

why dont they just make people register in person?

The picture suggests its a school were people are supposed to walk in anyway, so it seems not to be an online class/school?

(not an american and probably i dont understand how that part of the education system works... )

@briankrebs

Gotta be freakin kidding???

tl;dr: 25% of students enrolled in California community colleges are reportedly AI bots set up to commit financial aid fraud. Probably this time next year it will be 40-50 percent.

@briankrebs When I was a students each new quarter the administration department would call 📞 🗣️ force me to come in and pay my student asap💸 🤦🏼

@briankrebs And probably most of the effective ways to mitigate this are going to create barriers for genuine applicants who have access challenges like physical disabilities, transportation issues, etc.

@briankrebs In #Tennessee every faculty member at every state #college or #university must confirm the attendance of every student. This can still be a problem for completely #online courses, but no bot will ever get a #chemistry degree here! 🙏

@briankrebs Is there any way we can give such bots Venezuelan or Palestinian identities? I'd love to see ICE go looking for them.

Wow, had no idea this was a thing. Can AI bots solve captchas yet? Could this be curbed by requiring students to solve a couple of captcha puzzles when registering for the school?

"Select all the squares with _school_buses_".

@briankrebs My uneducated guess is there must be a way to verify identity and ferret out bots.

@briankrebs Of course. All the real students are hiding from ICE.

@briankrebs it's baffling to me that everyone in the comments is trying to figure out how to catch the bots by making it harder for real humans to enroll, instead of recognizing that with money incentives gone there's no fraud. Education should be free. For everyone. Take the financial aid fraud away by actually funding schools and making it into a service for getting an education instead of a profit center that can be defrauded.

@briankrebs Some of these people will become surgeons, so I should start taking my health really serious! 🌚

@dragonminded Okay, but that seems a little like saying the way to solve the windows malware problem is that everyone should just use linux. While that might be desirable from a threat perspective, it's not realistic in the short run and maybe beyond.

@briankrebs this is one of the stupidest replies I've gotten in a long time.

@briankrebs But isn't this identify theft and fraud? Isn't this, like, an issue for police or FBI?

@briankrebs @dragonminded Well, it works fine in a lot of countries.

@briankrebs I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Using computers to impersonate humans should be made into a serious crime.

#bots #humanverification

@briankrebs Note that the burden of discerning bots from humans is falling on the instructors, whose pay and positions are tied to enrollment numbers (this is the case at most if not all 4 year institutions as well). One of the many conflicting incentives of higher ed instruction today: do what is ethical and best for student learning OR make a better living within the bean counting framework of higher ed "leadership" by valuing enrollment numbers above all else.

@briankrebs - it’s pretty damn scummy for people to try and scam the financial aid department when the education system is already WAY past its limit. There a lot of needed infrastructure changes to the US education system to help students and teacher alike, and the idea of having to set aside our already limited resources to fight scam-bots is upsetting.

Education is cool, just want to make that clear. Teachers and educators of all levels need more help and less A.I. nonsense

@briankrebs at this point the only industry I'm 100% sure is going to be revolutionized by AI is the fraud industry.

@briankrebs there's No in person orientation when you enroll? Or even a zoom intro to check students against their school ID when class starts? What did you think would happen? The opportunity to cheat entire degrees is obvious when everything is remote or online.

@briankrebs Just enroll applicants that passed an online entrance test during the application process. Use AI on the community college side to evaluate test results. Just upload applicant's input into some AI tool and do the verification manually. If someone complains about being rejected offer personal registration once. Only humans permitted no Bots.

@briankrebs

So now they are ruining Community Colleges for everyone else too? Argh!

@briankrebs

@0daystolive @briankrebs Exactly. Which is why I oppose *any* purely online #chemistry courses.

Other disciplines should think about this exposure to fraud. But I doubt university administrators will turn off the ‘spigot’ of #online #education.

@briankrebs that's absolutely hilarious!!

@briankrebs Wow. This is scary.

@briankrebs I just yearn for the ability to drop students who don't show up.