This past semester was an odd one for me. One of my sections of first-year writing started with 22 students and finished with 10, the highest withdrawal/fail rate I’ve ever had. (My other section started with 25 and finished with 19, which is more typical). In my Writing, Rhetoric, and AI class, I had an example of the absolute most blatant case of cheating I’ve seen in almost 40 years where a student handed in the work of another student who was also in that class, as if I wouldn’t notice, which proves that old-fashioned/non-AI cheating is still a thing. I also had a few attempts at AI cheating in all three of my classes, and I had an especially “problematic” student in one class which required many emails, face-to-face meetings, and phone conferences to resolve.
That was all a lot, but the oddest thing for me last semester was the ghost students in the AI class.
“What do you mean, ghost students?” As this article from Milwaukee’s ABC affiliate WISN 12 website describes, it’s an identity theft scam. “Thieves [who are are usually a part of organized computer crime groups] apply for federal student aid using someone else’s name. Some of the cash goes to the school. The rest, typically earmarked for books and housing, is placed into an account for the scammer to withdraw.” Those living expenses are typically around $10,000. Ghost student scams have been around for a while and have been a problem for online students at community colleges because those schools typically don’t charge a fee to apply and more or less admit everyone. According to this article from an ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, nearly a third of California community college student applications in 2024 were ghosts and it accounted for more than $13 million in fraud.
Now this scam is coming to places like EMU. Here’s what it looked like from my POV:
During the fall semester last school year, my special topics AI class filled up, and so the course ran again this past winter (what everyone else calls spring) term. The course didn’t have any prerequisites (which is typical of special topics), and in the fall semester, I had a few students who should have never signed up in the first place who had to withdraw. I wanted to avoid that for the winter term, so I reviewed the roll in December before the winter term began just to warn non-English major types.
I had four students who were clearly in the wrong place. All four of these students were first year students enrolling at EMU for their first semester in January 2026 (which is in itself odd since freshmen almost always begin in the fall), and all four were signed up for just two online courses: mine and a 100-level gen ed class. I didn’t think too much about the oddness of that at the time, but I did email these students before the semester began and suggested that maybe they shouldn’t be starting college with a class for seniors and MA students. Of course, I never heard back.
An important note on my approach to teaching online: I have always taught online courses asynchronously and focused on discussion and small group activities, I suppose because I’ve never taught a lecture hall-type/”stand and deliver” course. Also, other than during Covid when we had to teach everything online, all of my online teaching have been classes that are for advanced undergraduates and MA students. I note this because I think a lot of my colleagues tend to teach online in a way that replicates the lecture hall, and they tend to teach 100-level gen ed classes online.
The semester began on January 12, and as I typically do in online classes, we started with a simple post where students introduce themselves. This is a very low-stakes discussion post more along the lines of “test-test-test, 1-2-3, is this thing on” as much as anything else. My mysterious new freshmen posted their introductions on time (albeit in hindsight, clearly AI) along with everyone else, and they also responded to peers. These students also responded to the next discussion prompts due on January 14– at least initially. January 19 was MLK Day, but there were more discussion posts due on January 20 and also January 21. While the other students were getting the hang of it, these four stopped. I emailed each of them to tell them that they would need to participate in these discussions if they hoped to pass, and also they still had time to withdraw to receive a refund on their tuition.
It’s not that weird for students to sign up for an online class and then quickly stop participating because they decided it wasn’t a class for them. But I thought the situation was weird enough with these four students that I looked them up on EMU’s system. On the Wednesday or Thursday after MLK Day, I contacted the instructors of the gen ed classes these students were taking (along with mine) to ask those faculty if these students were participating in their online classes. All four of the instructors emailed me back and essentially said they hadn’t noticed anything unusual, and besides, this was only the second week of class. This surprised me, though I suppose these other instructors saw their online courses as more like a lecture hall, and no one really expects students in those classes to demonstrate a lot of presence.
By the third week of class and after more emails to these students went unanswered, I did a search for “con where students register for online class” or something like that, and I landed on some articles like the ones I shared at the beginning. Then I emailed the Registrar and the other faculty/instructors, saying “hey, I think these are ‘ghost students,'” and the Registrar emailed me back to tell me she thought I was probably right.
At the time, I thought I might try to write something to send to a place like Inside Higher Ed or The Chronicle; that didn’t happen because the semester got away from me/got weird. But I did meet with EMU’s VP for Enrollment, Katie Condon, to talk about my particular ghosts and what EMU is trying to do about them. It’s not an easy problem to solve. At universities like U of Michigan or Michigan State where applying students have to pay a fee and submit more information, this isn’t an issue. It has become an issue for EMU (and other similar opportunity-granting institutions) because we’re waiving application fees and letting in pretty much anyone who applies. Plus we are willing to do this for students who are only enrolled online and who never have to do anything in the admission process to prove they are “real.” I guess EMU’s general counsel contacted someone at the FBI about this, but that was only because someone in the general counsel’s office knew someone in the FBI.
This is all a problem that is likely to get worse with agentic AI too.
One thing that Condon told me (something the now former provost suggested in a conversation with her about these ghosts) is that maybe online instructors need to do something at the beginning of the semester to demonstrate “proof of life.” In hindsight, I should have suggested to Condon that perhaps that’s something EMU needs to do when they admit students in the first place. But one thing we talked about (and I’ve learned this is a common way other instructors have addressed the ghosting problem) is to require students to record and share a selfie introduction instead of a written one at the beginning of the semester. I’ll be going that route in the fall. It’s not foolproof, of course– plenty of AI video fakes out there!– but for these crooks, it probably represents a bar too high to easily cross.
Ultimately, like most things about technology’s impacts on the teaching of writing, I think the fact that ghost student scams exist at all says a lot about how we routinely treat students– particularly in online classes– not as actual humans but rather as disembodied and incorporeal, names that show up in the Canvas grade book with no other presence in the world. I like to think that my approach to teaching online as discussion-oriented rather than as a lecture format helps, and I do feel like I get to know most of my online students as humans behind the words/screens by the end of the semester. But this is far from foolproof. My assumption is my ghost students disappeared once they had cashed in on the financial aid package, but had they stayed longer– maybe even through the entire semester– I’m not sure I would have ever known.