Student-Centered Approach
You work hard to attend college. Scammers work even harder to steal your money and identity. Protect your most valuable asset.
- Report Financial Aid Fraud and Identity Theft: If you suspect your student information has been stolen, act quickly to report it.
- How to Protect Your Identity: Learn how to protect yourself when applying for financial aid.
- Beware of Student Loan Debt Relief Companies: Don’t get scammed by false promises.
- Report identity theft: Report if your identity is being misused in any way (not just related to financial aid).
A Student-Centered Approach to Fraud Detection
As we work to improve our fraud prevention and mitigation strategies, it is important to make explicit that "students" are not committing fraud.
Bad actors looking to take advantage of the system, and obtain financial resources meant for students, are the individuals committing fraud. It is critical that any fraud prevention or mitigation approach aims to prevent harm to real students.
With this in mind, we recommend engaging with students in authentic, meaningful, and diverse ways. A multi-layered and varied approach to student engagement is an important strategy that facilitates support for real students while establishing multiple data points for identifying inactive or suspicious student participation.
Recommended strategies include the following:
- Proactively reach out to students that have not engaged prior to dropping them from the course.
- Hold and encourage early attendance in virtual office hours.
- Review, at least briefly, any work submitted prior to 10-day census to ensure it matches the subject matter being taught or relates in other ways to the assignment the student was to complete.
- Be aware of oddities in enrollment, such as multiple students with the same phone number.
- Review student engagement and login frequency data in Canvas for online courses.
- Include real-time, or near real-time, interaction with students either during or outside of class.
- For larger online classes, consider activities that are harder to automate responses to, including those that are separate from the course delivery platform, e.g., incorporating polling questions or using options within your local Learning Management System, such as a Canvas quiz.
