If a claim or violation arises, schools are seemingly presumed guilty until proven innocent, and it’s on the school to provide the burden of proof. In fact, regulators will eliminate the burden of proof on students claiming fraud if ED-proposed changes to borrower defense pass. Tracking school-wide data and storing it in a cloud-based solution will protect your school with a strong audit trail and verifiable records.

Student Data

Tracking student attendance data is critical to combating fraudulent identity theft complaints and borrower defense claims. Unfortunately, schools have already seen increased fraudulent identity theft complaints, and it’s likely to worsen when student loan repayments begin. To stop these complaints, some schools are using a combination of student identification and attendance records. When schools take attendance using software and store data in the cloud, it’s easy to quickly pull accurate, down-to-the-second student records as proof of student attendance. 

Learn how Concorde Career College combated fraudulent identity theft complaints, sometimes with a single email, using CourseKey. 

Software also helps schools substantiate attendance online. When COVID-19 first shook up the world, accreditors and the Department of Education were generous with online learning regulations, but they are less forgiving after well over a year. As a result, schools must be able to substantiate asynchronous online attendance and engagement to prove that students received the education they were promised. Many schools have already mentioned that auditors are examining online attendance data with far more scrutiny than ever before. 

Instructor and Course Data

If you’re relying on instructors to enter attendance data or hand off an attendance sheet at the end of the day, your school is open to instructor fraud. Instructors may start class early or end class late without flagging the schedule deviation to administrators. Instructor fraud is rarely ill-intentioned, but it can greatly impact compliance and borrower defense should a student raise a concern. With mobile attendance software, administrators have an immediate, accurate view of when class starts and ends. As a result, administrators can quickly catch instructor and course trends and intervene before it becomes a compliance concern. 

With cloud storage, schools can keep this data on file well after a cohort graduates. Should a former student claim that an instructor short-changed their education, schools can easily pull course-level data, proving that class started and ended on time.