18 Ghost Students

“Ghost students” refer to fraudulently enrolled students who are not genuinely seeking an education.  These individuals seek either to obtain college credentials such as an .edu email address or to commit financial aid fraud.  These students take up seats in courses, steal resources away from legitimate students, and undermine our overall academic integrity.

What is NIC doing about this?

We want to assure faculty that steps are being taken to address the increase in fraudulent applications.  We are working on several fronts to prevent these fraudsters from gaining access to our college.

• The Admissions team is scrutinizing applications thoroughly.  This is a manual process and is labor intensive, but through this work common criteria have been identified that are helping us isolate countries and specific states that are higher risk.  If an application is identified as suspicious, outreach is being made to the student.  If action isn’t taken within a week, the application is withdrawn.
• The Financial Aid team is completing additional validation checks to help find and eliminate suspicious accounts and withdraw aid.
• The Registrar’s Office is dropping students identified as fraudulent from classes.
• The Advising Office is tracking suspicious accounts and diligently reporting these for further investigation.
• The Information Technology team, in partnership with Enrollment Services, is evaluating technology tools that use AI to validate application information in real time using multiple data points which will provide a risk score.  This technology can also request identification validation which helps protect against stolen identity information.  This is similar technology used by services such as id.me.
• The Information Technology team has improved its ability to monitor and trace account login behavior of suspicious accounts which can aid in determining if an account is being used for fraud.

What can faculty do now?

Report suspicious behavior.  In all cases, you should use your best judgement and trust your instincts.  As faculty members, you know best how your students interact with your courses.  If something feels off, report it.  Additionally, please remember it is extremely important that you accurately report non-attendance as this is also a way for us to identify potential fraud.

Here are some guidelines to help identify potentially fraudulent accounts:

• The student is taking only online courses.
• The student is receiving financial aid.
• The student appears to only be doing the minimum requirements for discussion posts or other assignments or is not participating in discussion posts.
• The student does not submit assignments which require video interaction or validation such as proctored online exams or using Zoom.
• The student submits the exact, or very similar information for assignments indicating they are reusing information or modifying the same information slightly.
• AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are being used to submit assignments.

Although the above statements may be indicators that an account is fraudulent, please keep in mind that it does not automatically qualify a student as actually being fraudulent.

We have developed a process that will allow you to easily report suspicious activity for investigation.  Once you identify suspicious activity, you will report your concerns via your MyNIC portal.  A team will then investigate the account and take action when appropriate.

To help ensure we are made aware of any suspicious student activity, please use this form to report suspicious accounts:

https://forms.office.com/r/49gP4KCJSj

You can also find this link in the my.nic.edu portal under “suspicious student account submission” which will take you directly to the above link.