I wonder if there are perverse incentives preventing this from being fixed. The financial aid program looks like a success issuing more funds, the schools see increased enrollment, and the fraudsters go without saying. Seems like a win-win-win.
Sort of. As a professor who has encountered this, on one hand if I have fewer papers to grade then I'm happy but on the other hand the "students" do submit work for at least the first couple weeks that I still had to grade. (After that we caught on and got them out of the class). Additionally, I would rather just grade good papers than try to figure out why their work seemed weird. Is it AI generated? A non-native english speaker? Good old fashioned plagiarism? or just bad work?
Last semester was the first time I encountered it and I was suspicious and then I talked to a colleague who noticed identical irregularities.
