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Integrity AGAIN!!!!

2/26/2014

1 Comment

 
Recently, five colleges were hit with financial aid fraud schemes.  At one, a teacher spotted a pattern of lack of engagement in one of their classes.  The college  IT department checked  out IP addresses finding them all leading to the same person.  (There was an article about this in the Chronicles last week.)

The Feds are taking the issue of financial aid fraud and student authentication up again and there is a really important post at WCET this morning about it.  (see below)

I think that  the California Community College OEI program at  Foothill and Butte Colleges, will, in their state wide efforts have to address this in the application and common assessment processes, but we need to be vigilant in our classes and our own processes in the meantime. 

So, as I see it there are three levels of defense that will have to be addressed: 
1. State-wide technology agencies will have to administer integrity checks at application;
2. Individual colleges will have to put in place any technology safeguards possible (the least of which is password refresh process for your CMS, if you don't have one.) and possibly, hire a service like Proctor-U.
3.  DE Teachers will have to use multiple measures of assessment (not high stakes tests), proctoring where ever possible (can be done remotely-put a process in place), talk to their students about what cheating, plagiarism, and financial fraud are (they get emails asking them "please don't drop me, I'll loose my financial aid!" all the time), and watch for patterns of disengagement.

This is going to be a huge issue and all of the colleges offering DE programs will need to stay on top of it.

The link to the information is at: http://wcetblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/financial-aid-fraud/


1 Comment
Rhonda Nishimoto link
2/26/2014 12:32:02 am

Not only do I have online students who say, "don't drop me I have financial aid", but I also have to be vigilant in watching those students who play the numbers and time game. Financial aid distributions occur at set times within a semester. The following may help with this at the faculty level:

Specifically state in the syllabus the drop policy relative to the assignments completed. Online students, students must be completing assignments (not discussions or tests --those are easy to do and look like you are participating). No assignments in a two week period results in a drop from the course. AND drop them.

An announcement dealing with Financial Aid fraud belongs in the syllabus and reiterated in the Announcements and through tweets.

At the college level, calculating student success must not include those instructor dropped students. Otherwise, faculty is penalized for being vigilant.

Send out the financial aid distribution schedule EVERY semester.

There are other things to be done, but as a college instructor, I am adamant about not being party to financial aid fraud. My students know it, my department knows it and word gets around.

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