Apr 21, 2025 07:00:00

Numerous cases of fictitious 'bot students' taking online classes, creating assignments with AI, and stealing grants

Since schools moved to online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rise in 'bot students,' primarily at community colleges, who are trying to stay enrolled until their grant money is paid out.

As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond | Voice of San Diego

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

Financial aid fraud keeps climbing in CA community colleges- CalMatters
https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/04/financial-aid-fraud-2/

According to community college faculty, in the current situation where classes are completely shifted to online classes, the number of 'bot students' who respond in ways that no normal human would do is increasing. It is unclear whether they are completely machines or people hiding their identities. As for their purpose, they may be trying to get an easy way to get credits, but the news site Voice of San Diego speculates that 'many of them are trying to get grant funding.'

Community colleges are public, two-year institutions that are often cheaper than four-year 'universities.' They are often attended by people from the local community and may receive state or federal subsidies, which Voice of San Diego points out are exactly what bot students want.

In 2021, the California Community Colleges Administration

reported that about 20% of applications to community colleges were likely to be fake, and that they could be seen to be machine-generated, from applications to grant applications. One of the reasons community colleges are being targeted is because they offer free application fees.

In fact, one YouTuber created a video in which they used a bot to complete the entire application process for Contra Costa College, demonstrating that it was possible for a bot to get into college. This practice has become so common that in 2024, 65,000 applications for aid were fake, all from people claiming to be community college students.

In some cases, the government failed to detect the fakes and gave out grant money, which will amount to more than $10 million from the federal government and more than $3 million from the state government in the year leading up to April 2025. The California Community College Administration has explained that the scale of fraud is relatively small, given that the total grant funding is $3.2 billion, but some taxpayers are not convinced.

Faculty are also having a hard time identifying bots. Elizabeth Smith, a professor at Southwestern College, said she has whittled down her class from 104 students to just 15, identifying the rest as bots. 'At first I was excited that so many students were interested in my class, but now I'm just heartbroken,' she said.

The bots are easy to spot because they use expressions that are uncommon among modern students and introduce themselves in texts with clearly robotic

statements like, 'Hello, I'm a student from [insert city name],' but sometimes it's hard to tell. For this reason, some teachers call suspicious students to find out.

In one case, the call went through but it turned out that the person wasn't even enrolled at the college and their identity had simply been used without their permission.

'Before, I didn't have to judge whether my students were human or not. They were human. Now I have to have that conversation: 'Are you real? Is your work real?'' said Eric Maag, a teacher at Southwestern College for 21 years. He said the influx of bot students has changed what it means to be a teacher.

Community college administrators are also investing resources in trying to eliminate bots, but some point out that the efforts are not sustainable. Because community colleges have many older students in the prime of their working lives, the end of online classes is not a fundamental solution, and technological solutions are needed.

'Fighting evolving bots is like playing whack-a-mole, and while I understand people wanting a magic solution to solve the bot crisis, it's not possible,' said Mark Sanchez, president of Southwestern College.