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IT Students Contract Out Coursework To India
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jun 26, 2008 09:08 AM
from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.
from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect." The irony, of course, is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway.
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Submission: IT students contract out coursework to India by Anonymous Coward
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Just deserts... (Score:5, Insightful)
... this is what you get in a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty.
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would of phrased that another way.
Parent
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Insightful)
>..this is what you get in a society when everybody believes that they deserve everything and yet everybody is unwilling to do any hard work.
Funny, I would have said this is what you get in a society that values a piece of paper over hard work.
You can work 10x harder, 10x faster, and 10x smarter than the guy next to you, but if you didn't finish high-school/college/university, you won't get the better job.
Parent
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have said something more like:
That assumes we're talking about the US of course. We Americans are really proud of our work ethic, yet we teach our children that work is evil, struggling is stupid, and the ideal situation is one where everyone is handed everything on a silver platter.
Really, if you look at what's being taught by parents and by the public school system, that's one of the chief messages we send to our kids. It wasn't until I got into college (a small private college) that I realized that there was actually value in the work itself. That sometimes (particularly in education) end-result (i.e. good grades and eventually a degree) isn't the most important thing.
I mean, you listen to people talk, and they talk about how college is great because it opens so many doors, and a college diploma provides so many opportunities. That's all backwards. College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide.
Parent
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of college is to gain an education and grow intellectually. Learning how to get stuff done is certainly part of it, but it's not the only, or even the biggest, part of it. If that's all you need then there's no need to pay for the experience.
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
Who told you that this is outsourcing?
Farming out homework is something that has been going on since the days when the only thing that was studied in Heidelberg was theology.
There is nothing particularly new and surprising here except Internet enabling the homework to be farmed out further afield.
Further to this, a f2f examination can determine if the homework is real or not real in a matter of seconds. So anyone bitching about the practice becoming more prevalent should actually bitch about tests and assignments replacing good old f2f examination.
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would it not be outsourcing? Outsourcing refers to anything that you pay someone else to do instead of doing it yourself. It's only in bizarro-world Slashdot land that "outsourcing" has this ridiculously specific definition of "recent activities involving paying overseas software companies instead of using in-house programmers".
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no. It's like coal power; sure it's cheap electricity, but it's cheap mainly because the costs in terms of pollution and illness are unaccounted for.
China is a great example of the dangers of ignoring the environment; hell, there is still an article on the front page of /. about it. Ftfa 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. Sure, they produce cheap plastic crap cheaper than anyone else, but those costs will catch up with them and they will have to be paid.
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Interesting)
Refute it or accept it. Or just walk away.
States with no minimum wage (but must follow federal wage): Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee.
Poverty rate: Alabama (7th), Louisiana (2nd), Mississippi (1st), South Carolina (10th), Tennessee (11th).
Are these your idea of vibrant economies? Shouldn't they be rolling in money from all those outsourced jobs?
More than 20 state pay HIGHER than the federal minimum wage. Now YOU find reputable evidence that they have lost significant numbers of jobs? Did their hotels close? Is everyone now mowing their own lawns? Did the fast food industry collapse?
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
You are also ignoring history which states otherwise. Why do you think minimum wage laws and unions were formed in the first place?
Losing minimum wage has shown itself to send a whole populous down into poverty. You need only look at the average income of an American over the last 100 years to see that when you make more money your quality of life goes up. More people today are making more money and enjoy a much higher quality of life than my grand parents did during the depression.
Parent was correct in calling your naive, either that or willfully ignorant.
Parent
Re:Thank minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, outsourcing is caused by labor being cheaper in a different area.
A minimum wage is one specific reason (not general) why labor might be cheaper in one area than another.
Of course, unless you're implying that the minimum wage significantly influences the wages of workers who earn well above the minimum wage, much outsourcing (like IT outsourcing) isn't caused by minimum wage.
Parent
Re:Minimum wage and other laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Pithy, frightening scenarios backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded no matter how frightening.
"The first goal of American government is to protect the profitability of domestic and foreign businesses"
Actually the first and only goal of the government should be to uphold the rights of its citizenry, but feel free to continue to mischaracterize.
The poster was not saying what the goal of the American government SHOULD BE, he was saying what the goal of the American government ACTUALLY IS.
If America was so concerned about protecting human rights, it wouldn't spend so much time trying to privatize absolutely everything, deny global warming, and try to impose democracy with a gun on others. And and don't forget about preventing non-coalition countries from bidding on reconstruction contracts in Iraq. No.. that's not essentially a scheme to raise the cost of reconstruction and increase profits for american companies at the expense of Iraqi citizens.
Parent
Re:Minimum wage and other laws (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't have the capital to invest in the technology, while they DO have a surplus of labour. It's simple economics.
Parent
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Interesting)
Undergrad stuff, sure. There you have a few hundred students to a professor/lecturer. But postgrad?
My supervisor had exactly one student doing postgrad - me. Sure, some supervisors had up to 20 students, but still they knew exactly what those students were capable of. Someone handing in work that isn't theirs can't happen in such a situation
So maybe this isn't the result of "a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty," but instead the result of an extremely bad student to supervisor ratio.
The solution? I guess either pay more money to Universities to get more lecturers, or FLAMEBAIT make courses harder so that only few students survive END FLAMEBAIT.
Parent
Re:Just deserts... (Score:5, Funny)
What I don't understand is how could you possibly hand in a postgraduate dissertation which you didn't write....
I agree, however, my Ph. D. adviser once offered to write my dissertation for $3,000, which at the time (being a poor student), was a ridiculous amount of money (and immoral to boot).
In retrospect, I should've taken a loan and paid him to do it, it would've been easier and far more ethical than actually writing it myself.
Parent
Pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
I have always written programs because it is fun and rewarding. That was true in middle school, true in high school, true in college, and true now (I'm close to 40). When it's not fun I'll stop doing it. How is paying someone else to write your programs fun? How is it rewarding? It's not; it is just pathetic.
Re:Pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, agreed. But there's a difference between logical reasoning and understanding and actual implementation.
Basically you're saying, in this context; "I understand the logical approach. So there's no need for me to put time in implementing it. A monkey without any sense of logic could produce a program with the same output."
So you'd like someone, who you value "unable to understand the deeper underlaying logic", to write your program representing the way you understood the problem and how it could be solved?
It's to me also a very troubling progress; people being trained to become programmers or who will have to program, but already ,before being skilled enough or having any experience, have the attitude "oh, I can outsource it!". Once those end up in the industry, what are those worth? "I can't be bothered with it. Let them outsource it"... And everyone throws their arms in the ari "oh noes, were are our jobs going?"
Having done alot of projects "in the real world", it's rarely who put the project together who are the ones brainstorming how to make it fit more logcally without breaking the design. Those "finger in air"-documents, created by those with a simular attitude, without practical "hands on" knowledge *think* it's all fitting as a glove. But once you try to implement it you're bumping into alot of surprices and burning money with heaps.
Ideally someone with alot of practical knowledge should lead these sorts of projects just for this reason. But where are you at when you're even not willing to gather a bit of experience, because it seems "unnecessary"?
It's a combination of experience and skill (ability to logically understand the whole), to verify your analysis into practice, link back and evolve in your skillsets that help you to be better at what you do.
I've stood at both sides in projects, and it's also not as straightforwards to come up with something that works perfectly. It all might be very logical, it's not definite and bringing it into being, you always have a surprice here and there.
There's never perfection and you never know enough, each day I still learn and finetune my skills. If you're starting to outsource your potential even before you can assign yourself a certain title, it's a bit of a dubious thing to do.
It reminds me of this engineer, taking huge pride in a job well done after his equations and calculations were all perfectly done, with added whitenoise buffers calculated to the point he felt he could be pleased with himself and nothing could go wrong. The moment his creation came into being, he spent weeks finding the "sweetspot" to make it work. His clash with the "pure theory and logic" and the actual world were a tough lesson.
Parent
Re:Pathetic (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
An excellent argument... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.
Mind you, this is also a good argument for forcing students to show their intermediate work (design, etc) and to do said intermediate work with pen and paper. It's a lot harder to outsource something that would be in the wrong handwriting and have to be Fedex'd from India.
Re:An excellent argument... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:An excellent argument... (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, can you imagine handwritten assignments in Comp sci? Have you seen the handwriting of the average CS geek?
My wierd liberal-arty background puts me in the top tier of CS handwriting (erratic but occasionally legible) but the fast majority of my peers fall into the average bracket (incomprehensible scrawl), and there are plenty who sink to the darkest depths (febrile 2 year old, epileptic with dyslexia) from whence no meaning can be derived.
If it weren't for keyboards, none of us would be able to convey our ideas in written form.
Parent
Re:An excellent argument... (Score:5, Funny)
It was that way where I was (in the US); doesn't help that I'm a wordy bastard either. I used to resort to writing in script because my cursive is more legible than the bastard hybrid of print and cursive I normally write in.
That's relative though. I had a prof complain about the cursive, so I switched to my "default" handwriting, and then he complained about that, despite my habit of writing the uppercase and lowercase alphabet on the top of the first page of every blue book, as a decryption key. The only thing my writing has going for it is that my default font size is about 16pt, so at least it's big.
Parent
Re:An excellent argument... (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, this is common, and not necessarily indicative of a lie. I've written a lot of C code in my time, but for the last four months my job has had me writing only Java -- if someone were to sit me down to do a practical C test, I'd probably do pretty poorly after being out of it (and thinking in OO mode) for so long. If you're getting people just out of their Masters, you're getting people who had to stop what they were doing and write a Master's thesis, which seems to me like a similar obstacle to proper thinking.
Parent
So talk to the student? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the coursework / dissertation seems out of line with the student's "normal" performance .. hey, take five minutes (with the work in front of you, not in front of him), and ask him a few questions about it.
How long will it take to determine he doesn't know squat about what he turned in, eh?
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, they might as well start early and get into the practice of out-sourcing.
"£100 for postgraduate dissertations."
Seriously!? If those dissertations are any good, we might as well go directly to the source and hire those guys to do R & D for us.
Universities~=Corporate america (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently read one of Feynnman's books and as odd a character he is, I think he hit the nail on the head when talking about how teachers today simply dish out information and the students memorize. This has lent to a society where students know they are going to forget the courseload in a month so why not have someone else do the work for you. College is all about the piece of paper now adays anyway so you can get a higher paying job. At least that is the way the universities seem to present themselves in their advertisements.
You want to keep students from outsourcing? Push them harder, teach rather than have them memorize, administratively, get more teachers. Universities should be hard, people should drop out, if you are not passionate about the subject then head to Vo-Tech. I want universities to go back to learning institutions rather than the factories they have become.
Re:Universities~=Corporate america (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Universities~=Corporate america (Score:5, Insightful)
And so the dominoes continue to fall. Look even more closely at K-12 public schools. You want to talk about "simply dish out information and the students memorize?" That's what the typical K-12 education is right there. This is part of the problem with standardized tests at this phase in a student's life. In K-12, you should be taught how to think and problem solve as the basis for later in your education. Instead, we consider it progress if they know when the war of 1812 was fought. After all, getting answers "right" improves standardized test scores. Knowing why it was fought, its ramifications, and what we need to learn from it doesn't do anything to bring more $$$ into the school system.
Then you can go even farther back and look at how parents don't teach their kids anything until they get to school (after all, it's the school's job!) and the problem just keeps getting worse.
America has become a society where education just isn't valued. I could go on and on...
Parent
Colleges don't have a choice. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not being lenient, they are acting out of fear of lawsuits and funding cuts.
Lenient is the PC way of saying we're letting unqualified people in because they meet one quota or another. Lenient is PC for saying passing over better qualified students because they don't come with bonus money : read government funds.
One thing that does amaze me is some of the larger "private" schools who are sitting on billions all the while bemoaning the fact that the government doesn't do enough to pay for quota groups to attend. BILLIONS. Their interest alone would pay for many thousands to have access to their schools but they prefer to sit on it.
Sorry, the courts and congress have already decided that merit is not a valid measurement, especially if declaring one side having more offends another.
The one great truth too many people want to ignore is that we are not all created equal. The law can state otherwise, "feel gooders" can cry all they want, the PC police can declare the sentence "hate speech" but fortunately nature doesn't care.
Parent
Re:Universities~=Corporate america (Score:5, Insightful)
Leads to people complaining that there aren't enough educated peopleA piece of paper does not mean you are educated, especially if all your classes were dumbed down so you didn't actually retain any useful knowledge. This is why the system does not work. The fact that you seem to be on the down the courses so more people can get into the "more smarter jobs for america" thought path is really really sad. Essentially you are saying we need a bunch of sub par people in the "smart jobs" so we should give them the same credentials as much more capable people so we can fill a seat....that is just assinine and makes credentials worthless.
Parent
Read the Copyright (Score:5, Funny)
Clever but self defeating (Score:5, Interesting)
That will work until the have to sit down for an actual test or later when they try to hold a job. Might get the cheaters through a class but it's hard to hide a lack of training in the real world. I'm always astonished at the effort people put in to avoid work.
Of course I would blame the professors too for designing a course where such cheating is practically possible. There are definitely ways to make this sort of cheating much harder. In class tests and in class assignments are among the more obvious methods.
Re:Clever but self defeating (Score:5, Funny)
I saw that in real life. A friend on my dorm floor who had to take a token CS class for his major decided to "outsource" the lab assignments to me. The first week he asked me to do the assignment, I said "Sure, here you go", and whipped out the "Hello World" in 20 seconds. The next week I did his insertion sort in 2 minutes. This went on for a couple more weeks.
About halfway through the semester, when he got something annoying like a balanced red-black tree, I said "Sorry, I'm too busy to tackle that one right now". Of course, by this point he had learned jack shit by not doing any of the work. He didn't finish the rest of the assignments, bombed the tests, and ended up having to take the course again the next semester. In the end it was a big hit on his GPA, he'd wasted many hours of redundant lecture time, and he had to eventually do all the work on his own anyway.
Parent
Re:Clever but self defeating (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Indubitably (Score:5, Funny)
My karma's gone way up ever since I started outsourcing my comments.
Re:Indubitably (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Sir,
We will have your obligatory Futurama reference done by next Tuesday. Please transfer the funds to the aforementioned offshore bank account.
Parent
Impossible to detect? (Score:5, Interesting)
How can this be impossible to detect? I remember that when I submitted my MA dissertation (a 50,000 word piece about Roman military history), I had a three hour viva on it, where two senior members of the faculty and an external examiner asked me a huge range of questions about not only the subject matter itself, but the processes I'd gone through in researching and writing my dissertation. I know for sure that if I hadn't written the thing myself, there was no way I could have made it through that. Even my significantly more modest undergraduate dissertation (a snip at just 10,000 words) was subject to a 45 minute viva, before a similar panel. Again, if I'd paid somebody else to write it, I'd have stumbled within the first five minutes.
It seems here that "impossible to detect" actually means "impossible to detect without using tried and tested methods that are just too tiresome and/or expensive to use". Admittedly, viva scrutiny isn't possible for every single assignment, but I really would hope that any institution worth its salt would be subjecting final year dissertations to this level of probing. Maybe this doesn't apply in IT courses? I'd find that very surprising, but maybe somebody else with more relevant experience could shed some light.
good! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect.
Maybe those lecturers should assign coursework that can't be done by a rent-a-coder in India.
To put it differently, if you're going to a university where the assignments can be outsourced to India for $10, you aren't learning the material you need in order to be globally competitive. Your best bet is to just leave.
University (Score:5, Interesting)
At my university (I mentioned it in a previous Slashdot post), most module projects have to include a presentation describing the work, with time for questions.
It's cruel, but I think it's quite funny when folks can't readily describe what they did*. It gets quite Phoenix Wright-y at times.
* It's not funny when you're nervous and can't think of a way to articulate how you designed a complex system, but it's usually easy to tell the difference.
Re:University (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, it is extremely easy to tell when someone is nervously forgetting from someone who has no clue. I've assessed presentations where the student who has quite obviously worked hard has lost their nerve and started blathering, and others where a pseudo confident fool talks a load of crap that reveals they didn't do the work.
As for exactly how you can tell. In my experience you can usually tell because the student who is genuine but too nervous tends to know their system so well they get themselves completely mixed up over their presentation, explaining things out of order and getting confused.
The lying student tends to be far too shallow in descriptions, and avoids low level detail. I even had one who's presentation was only linked to his slides in that they were both in the same room. It was hilarious.
Parent
I see a red door. (Score:5, Funny)
A poor overworked underclass doing everything for a rich undeserving upper-class?
This has never backfired in the past and never led to mass violence, never.
let them do it I say (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, if they think that all they need is the degree certificate in order to get a decent career in IT, then their stupidity leaves the field clear for those of us who slaved over a hot dissertation for months on end.
I have met such morons before, usually they end up in the lowest wage positions, or drifting from one shit job to the next.
When I was an undergrad in CS four years back, there were girls on my course offering sex in return for completing their programming assignments. I never took one of them up on this offer. To this day I have no idea why....
Re:let them do it I say (Score:5, Funny)
When I was an undergrad in CS four years back, there were girls on my course offering sex in return for completing their programming assignments. I never took one of them up on this offer. To this day I have no idea why....
Parent
Re:let them do it I say (Score:5, Funny)
maybe you do aswell... don't let the facial hair fool you.
Parent
Re:let them do it I say (Score:5, Funny)
Lack of a clean user interface?
Parent
This Slashdot article... (Score:5, Funny)
(Unfortunately so is the moderation on the comments)
And business will adapt ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply put, when I'm in a position to hire myself - in the next few years - I'll simply not hire any person who graduated after 2005 unless they've actually got real world experience under their belt and even then they'll have to get technical describing their work, what they did, etc. That, or they went to a top-notch university that I can trust to have avoided such behaviour.
So basically, it will screw all students including the honest ones.
Note that increasing costs in India, etc, mean that outsourcing will get less desirable over time. Of course, if the home-grown talent cheated their way to a degree (and mark my words that each time you hire a graduate and they're rubbish and know nothing, that university will be discarded on future applications) then outsourcing might be the only way to go, even if it's not any cheaper.