IT Students Contract Out Coursework To India

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.

Just deserts...

... this is what you get in a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty.

Re:Just deserts...

Are there deserts in India? I'm sure there aren't any in Romania.

Re:Just deserts...

Really?

I would of phrased that another way.

..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.

Re:Just deserts...

What I don't understand is how could you possibly hand in a postgraduate dissertation which you didn't write.

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.

Re:Just deserts...

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.

Pathetic

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

We always got quizzed and had to explain our logic, etc after turning in a major project. Just because you can produce a working program doesn't mean you understand the concept, outsourced or not.

An excellent argument...

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...

I like the idea, but requiring people to handwrite papers probably wouldn't do much to stop the whole thing. You could easily get the guy in India to show all his work, scan it, and send the files to you. Then all you have to do is copy it verbatim. I knew a girl who had a professor who insisted that papers be handwritten, saying something about curbing cheaters. Really, it made people more likely to cheat, because of the increased time it would take for them to write it out by hand. I think most people in her class just wrote the whole thing on the computer, which made editing easier, and then copied out the final product. The whole process just makes it harder on the honest students. I think that a good solution, is to place way more emphasis on exams or other more verifiable means of grading students.

Re:An excellent argument...

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.

So talk to the student?

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...

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

I see this as a direct result of the overloading of the Universities. When you have a prof teaching classrooms of 400 students, checking for cheating becomes practically impossible. I went to a smaller university where the ratio was significantly smaller. The profs could tell if another student wrote your code by style. That and in my university you had to comment like a mad fool, which depending on who you outsourced to might be a dead giveaway.

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

Sir, you are dead on. Just to add a little bit, I feel as though colleges have become far to lenient with who they are letting in. The standards have dropped much lower because it's becoming nearly impossible to find decent work without a B.S. in something. Colleges need to raise their standards. There are simply far too many areas of study where doing the bare minimum will afford you a decent grade. It almost seems that you need to go on with your education anymore to learn anything useful.

Read the Copyright

(C) Copyright Alexander Gromikov in the code is a big hint, if the students name is Ken Smith.

Clever but self defeating

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.

Indubitably

My karma's gone way up ever since I started outsourcing my comments.

Re:Indubitably

Dear Sir,

We will have your obligatory Futurama reference done by next Tuesday. Please transfer the funds to the aforementioned offshore bank account.

Impossible to detect?

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!

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

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

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.

I see a red door.

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

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....

This Slashdot article...

....was actually outsourced to an India Contractor.

(Unfortunately so is the moderation on the comments)