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Computer Science Students Outsource Homework
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'If U.S. companies can go online to outsource their programming, why can't U.S. computer students outsource their homework--which, after all, often involves writing sample programs?' Wall Street Journal colummnist Lee Gomes asks. 'Scruples aside, no reason at all. Search for "homework" in the data base of Rent A Coder projects, and you get 1,000 hits. (An impressive number, but still a tiny fraction of all computer students, the vast majority of whom are no doubt an honest and hardworking lot.)' Some of the Rent a Coder users appear to be outsourcing their way through school, at low costs--probably less than $100 per assignment. The posting are, of course, anonymous, but Gomes traces one to a student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where an instructor tells him that Rent a Coder contributed to a problem of plagiarism last semester."
Why even bother getting the degree in something if you don't want to do the work anyway? Isn't that shooting yourself in the foot? Besides the fact that you won't have a clue what you're doing since you'll never have learned anything, if you don't have any desire to do it in the first place, why are you in the field?
What really needs to be done is for instructors to wake up and realize that most people don't even need to outsource in order to complete thier projects. After all, who needs to pay a "Rent-A-Coder" when so many instructors provide obvious shortcuts via working examples of the projects right along the assignment, i.e., Java classes, etc... Why "outsource" when you can decompile Jad, change a few variable names and viola! Project Complete.
To really combat plagarism, instructors should focus more on theory, algorithms, deisgn patterns, etc.., and less on the actual solution to a particular problem in $programmingLanguage. If you really must assign projects, insert subtle flaws or traps in the assignment that would make the project all but impossible w/out direct interaction with the Professor to clarify requirments, etc... This would expose the weak students, the obvious cheats. and give a clearer picture of what's really going on in the classroom. Problem is there are too many instructors out there who just don't care, and aren't in it for the right reasons. In other words, they just don't care!
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Go ahead and outsource your homework. When you graduate and get a job, your company will realize you don't know anything and outsource your job to the same people. I've seen it happen.
http://religiousfreaks.com/I'm a C/S student at WSU in ohio, I'll keep that in mind when I am in the middle of my exam and I don't know how to write a program.
Really thought whats the point of going to college if your not going to learn it?
...why not be a buisness major instead? I mean, if you're not really passionate the work, why not pick an occupation that a) pays more and b) is easier to fake your way through?
and nail them on the final. what's the problem?
Most geeks *want* to learn. They don't want to steal code
to pass a class. However, stealing (borrowing) GPLed code
is expected (why re-invent the wheel?).
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
There were always several of these types in the low level classes I took when I got my BS. Why would you take computer science if you didn't actually want to learn it? There are much easier degrees to get, and almost anything would be more useful than csci if you don't plan on actually working with computers when you graduate. I mean seriously, what good could come of it?
Why in the old days we had to post the problems on USENET and hope not to get *plonked*! Kids today are sooo spoiled.
I couldn't afford that as a student. We need better rates.
It baffles me why people would buy "Strategy Guides" to games that they own. It isn't like the games are designed to be undefeatable without them. Much of the point of playing the game is lost if you are told exactly how to win it.
Homework is no different. If you don't do it, or cheat on it, no one loses out except you. In the real world, asking for help and passing off work to others is common. There's no test at the end where you aren't allowed to bring notes or ask someone for more information. It's all a group effort outside of school. So what's the problem with skipping a few assignments? The problem is that you don't learn anything, and you don't get any practice reinforcing what you've learned by doing the projects. That's your own loss, not anyone else's.
why can't U.S. computer students outsource their homework ?? Mainly because (despite what students might say) the purpose is for the students to do the work and learn from that, not to get a finished assignment/program. Whereas a company isn't so much as interested in the process as it is in the finished product.
Well, cheating is cheating, whether you get to use the work from a classmate or from someone in another part of the world. And if someone is really determined to take the easy way out, there is not a whole lot you can do to stop them; I doubt the majority of cheaters in college ever get caught (but allow for the fact that stupidity probably is a major factor in the need to cheat to begin with so that by itself increases the capture rate).
But what happens afterwards, when they're looking for a job and blow every interview since, well, they don't actually know what they're talking about? My guess, they blame the outsorcing trend for their failures...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I'm sure you could pay anyone to do your programming for you whether they're in another country or across the hall... but that's not the point.
If you're going through programming classes and not trying to learn programming, then why are you taking the classes in the first place?
I may have missed something, but I thought the whole point of paying thousands of dollars to take classes was to actually learn something, not to pay more money to have someone else learn for you.
If you manage to get a comp sci degree without learning any programming, then congratulations, but don't expect your boss to care what your degree says when they learn you can't even make a "Hello World" program.
If I was to pay someone when I was at uni to do my Java assignments for me, apart from the good mark I could have got it would have been bugger all help for me in my exam.
Going to a Java exam armed with a pencil and my brain was all the help I had, and by doing my assignments during the semester i learned everything i needed to know to pass my exam.
Cheaters will get found out eventually, if they manage to pass uni, they will not get very far.
You can only bullshit your way through something for so long before you hit the wall.
I want to become a really great guitarist. Maybe I can hire someone else to practice all those tedious scales, arpeggios, and chords. When they're done, I'll be able to play like Steve Vai!
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Th better part was that the student also used his real name in the listing.
No sig, sorry.
Before anyone forms an opinion they should watch a movie called "Cheaters". http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0218094/
It made me think differently about cheating.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"the vast majority of whom are no doubt an honest and hardworking lot."
... then yea. ;)
If by "honest and hardworking" you mean "getting their homework from a knowledgeable friend rather than outsourcing"
Who doesn't like free music?
Academic integrity aside, this isn't really a problem for the workforce. These student's will either not make it past the recruiting stage, and if they do, will likely be filtered out of the system when their superior's realize these graduates are useless.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
When I took a C++ course back in 1996, I was writing all my code on a Unix system through the shell. Everyone was, that is how the course was taught, and that is how I got started with Unix/Linux.
However, having come from an English and Biology major background, I was really confused when on one assignment the instructor praised one student who had used some GPL code to complete his assignment, in fact, all most all of the code was borrowed. The instructor told me about how code reuse was a good thing.
Given that he had a big beard, we worked on Unix, and we all had to use Emacs I think you can see which side of the camp he came down on. But before I really understood how code is used and shared (or not as the case may be) I was confused to no end how plagarism was acceptable in writing computer code.
Now that I understand how the GPL works, and why re-using code is a good thing, it makes more sense. Still, if you can do your job by outsourcing your job... well... I almost want to say more power to you.
I guess I don't totally agree with the above statement. But I guess what I really learned is that in school co-operation and simple solutions to problems are discouraged because instructors need to evaluate your performance. In the real world as long as the goal is accomplished, most people generally don't care about the means.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Why not? Because doing so violates the academic integrity policy of every last university in the nation, and as such makes you subject to anything from instant F in the class to being expelled.
One would think that's a good enough reason, considering the student is paying for the privilege of being in college.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
A lot of this went on in a game design course I took for Lead Game Designer. A lot of us (students) found others that excelled in certain areas and used it. After all, we were "Lead" designers. Cant code? Well this guy can code direct-x drivers. Cant even draw a stick figure? This guy can not only draw amazing art, but he knows how to design and animate the 3d models as well. Everyone traded talents and a lot of collaborating went on.
We didnt just buy work or have it done for us, it was always a team involvment. We all taught and learned from eachother.
Its one thing to have it done for you, its another to get help in exchange for help, backing one anothers weak areas and helping to improve them.
Though I guess this would be useful if I wanted more time, I would much rather learn how to do it myself, and as an added bonus I get to keep my $100 bucks.
I took the time to RTFA. In the first example, a student who'd been more interested in night life than their studies found somebody to fill out a take home final exam. Letting the students take the final of all things outside the classroom is simply begging for them to cheat. If not this way, some other, such as getting help from an older friend. That instructor should be fired, unless there's tenure involved. If so, simply don't assign him or her any more classes. Let them strut about with their title of Professor, and their tenure, if they want, but unless they're actually teaching, I doubt they're going to get paid, and they won't be giving any more good grades to cheaters.
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It really looks like we're (unwittingly?) creating a nation of managers whose only goal in life is to have a lot of money, live in luxury, and pawn off all the work to other people.
Students are presumably going for CS/IT degrees to get those "high-paying" jobs by managing their outsourced schoolwork. Imagine a world of Office Space Bill's -- I shudder to think. But sadly, I see this more and more - why do/learn it when you can pay someone else to? Odd no one stops to think about where they'll get the money to pay someone to live their life for them?
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
"It baffles me why people would buy "Strategy Guides" to games that they own. It isn't like the games are designed to be undefeatable without them. Much of the point of playing the game is lost if you are told exactly how to win it."
Try Schizm: Mysterious Journey then you'll have your answer.
"That's your own loss, not anyone else's."
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Even consequences.
I used to get really frustrated about those cheater types when I was doing my degree. Of course, now they're making $15 an hour in data entry while I'm pulling $110k in design...
(And you young whippersnappers who think $15 an hour is good - think some more.)
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
I did my undergrad at Oxford (granted, it was history, not CS, so maybe slightly offtopic here) but the system in use there is a good model of how to eliminate this kind of problem. You write an essay (or program as the case may be) and then sit down and get grilled about what you wrote for an hour with your professor. If you are bullshitting, or god help you plagiarizing, it becomes obvious in about two minutes. It's not perfect, but you really have to focus on understanding, rather than regurgitating material or producing a set amount of text.
These days, sadly, a lot of people complain that this system is too "archaic" and "inefficient", which makes me wonder what exactly is gained by "efficiently" pumping out graduates who don't remember anything about their subject when finals are over.
I have a few thought on this:
:) Hows that for Entrepreneurship? One can telecommute and then outsource all of his work to India....lets just hope those fools don't violate any NDAs!
First of all, it is probably morally wrong for students to have "other" people do their work for them. However, sometimes it really helps to have some "example" code from which to start learning. I'm torn between the two teaching methods but I believe that a good balance is necessary.
As an Electrical Engineer I was forced to learn to code (despite that fact that I really don't enjoy coding that much). I found that sometimes when a student jumps feet first into something they have a really steep learning curve. If they start with sample code and then get weaned off of it then that would be effective.
Ironically, "some" of those idiots were blamed for plagiarism! Oh how sweet justice is when students learn "Quality Control" through cheating.
On the flipside, I've seen arguments here that those students wont get anywhere in the workforce. I could imagine a scenario where individuals outsource their "personal" assignments (in the workforce) to India
I know I'm ranting but its my style.... I feel that I'm at least semi-on topic and that, at a minimum, made an attempt to say something interesting...
Matt Wong www.themindofmatthew.com
It is obvious to all of us that cheating is unethical from the cheater's perspective. It only hurts yourself, it isnt' fair to the others, yada, yada, yada.
But, is the transaction unethical from the perspective of the industrious coder whom the cheater hires? Does the rent-a-coder have an obligation to look beyond the color of his client's money, and into the content of his character?
From the article, we see that Rent A Coder has "tried but failed to curb the practice before." Is Rent A Coder obliged to try to stop the practice? Are they obliged to try harder?
As other people have said, perfect on every assignment won't help you in the midterm and the final. I am a physics major and I have seen the same sort of stuff, students will download the assignment solutions for next years classes and hope they are the same (often they are), or order the solutions manual from the publisher (alot of them are suprisingly lax in who they send it to).
Personally I find that sort of pointless, sure it means I can get 100% on the assignments, but when the exam is worth 55% of the mark and the midterm is worth 20%, that doesn't amount to much. I generally learn the course by struggling through the assignments, no matter how little they are worth. When it comes time for the final I have significantly less studying to do.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
now with everyone equipped with a webcam or digital camera geeks can see if the vixen on the other end is a troll or not. I had to drive 5 hours to an all woman's school once to find out.
ah, to be young again. i could outsource my work so i could concentrate on my primary focus, getting laid.
The schools keep cutting prof wages. What do they expect?
I look at this as a kind of moral erosion that will eventually lead to greater teaching discoveries.
I'm a programmer and I did all my own work through college. But thinking about this problem of cheating in a realistic light -- so what if they outsource? They should get some experience in outsourcing, and if they start early then they will be well ahead of other coders who work in a project management capacity.
That said, it's dishonest to pass work off as your own, if it's outsource material.
What profs should really do is:
1. Allow and encourage outsourcing.
2. Mark much harder on students who have outsourced.
3. Require all outsourcing meeting minutes (from RAC, MSN...etc).
4. Require superior design elements.
5. Require a receipt to keep track of how much was spent on the project.
6. Require project management reports.
This would give coders an idea of what it's really like, plus it will keep students from learning to become great liars (which really hurts us all).
Eventually computers will simply case out most code for us, so teaching coders to be casers is not really that enlightened, and yet most schools pound these kinds of requirements into students, dulling their wits and making them crabby.
Teaching coders to see the big picture will only come from a strong project management regiment, which is currently missing from most major programs. To them it's more about the lexicon, than the abstract understanding!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If I'm good at programming, why shouldn't I be able to SELL my hard work? Isn't that what capitalism is about? Supply and Demand. I have the supply - they have the demand. Now I agree that they should be punished if caught using my code for a project - but I have no problem selling it to them. It might be wise to include some small hidden sig - just that if someone complains I can prove its my work. Hell, I should put a EULA on it - "YOU AGREE NOT TO USE THIS FOR ANY SCHOOL ASSIGNMENTS".
Considering the work I've seen from some Masters and Doctorate level graduates, I'd guess this has been going on for years.
My momma gave birth to a winner, I gotta win.
I suppose if you did outsource your homework, you would then get killed on exams because as other people have pointed out, you would be a practical dunce. But, let's say you didn't fail the exam and went out and successfully passed yourself off and got employed. You would then end up living under the stress of being found out. Ultimately that's one of the biggest problems with being a fraud, the fear that you will be found out and nailed. Every time you hear someone is going to be canned, you will have the nagging fear it will be you, and every time you get a difficult assignment, you will sweat bullets whether you can handle the assignment or not. Look closely at people you know lie a lot, they are not happy people. Makes for a crappy life. Stress kills and the lies we tell are one of the biggest sources.
This question is like the question "why dog lick its balls?" the answer is because it can.
to edit out the copyright notices and comments in other languages :)
:D), but as he was talking out the door, you hear a bellow of "...by Bruce Proctor... SYED!"
;)
I'm serious about the copyright notice though; one time in school, a kid copied a major assignment verbatim... so verbatim he forgot to take off the big 'ol 'by Bruce Proctor' off the top.
When he read it in front of the class, the teacher was very impressed (the student is not the best ever
Good times
DYWYPI?
could somebody post on my behalf for a week, I got finals. and yeah my karma has to increase, shall offer $XX
First of all any computer science program worth anything at all will keep all previous assignments and run them through Moss. If your school doesn't do this your degree probably isn't worth anything anyway.
So now all those outsourced coders need to have a fresh implementation for each sale.
Second. Most upper division CS projects take a lot of time. I mean it's like a full time job. Not even most ace students could bang one a completely new version on top of their own course load. Most of these projects are simply not designed to be completed 100%. So that leaves professionals. And even if a student could afford a professional's rates a professor could spot a professional's work instantly. Either they would use some toolkit or framework or if they were good enough to bang it out without one then the work would be too good to be from a student that would not be familiar with the material before taking the course. Or even if that was a question a 5 minute interview would tell him the truth.
But now for the bad news. Most CS degrees ARE NOT worth anything. Most do not do due diligence. Many professors are not qualified to catch a cheat. Many professionals today are total frauds or grossly incompetent.
You pay money to a university to get "damn good" at something. If you want to be a fraud just fake your resume. Lots of people do it. I've met them. Especially if they are from other countries that do not speak English. How is your manager going to call India to see if you really have a degree from IIT and 10 years of experience as an architect? How is a behavioral interview going to find out if you really have a 2 year certificate and worked as a junior programmer for 2 years?
Nothing. But the barriers for entry are really that low out there.
"...why not be a buisness major instead? I mean, if you're not really passionate the work, why not pick an occupation that a) pays more and b) is easier to fake your way through?"
One question for you.
How do you know it's easy to "fake your way through", or "pays more"?
You must have tried then so you could give us your expert opinion.
I know the dudes who outsource are probably not gonna get thru finals. And I agree to siblings that yes we pay thousands of dollars to learn. But there're so many noobs in college that have no clue why they're there. They don't know that they're there to learn and merely view the education as a process they must go through in order to head for the big world.
For these students, you can't talk them into the learning theory. They won't buy it. Perhaps they're rich, perhaps they don't know what they want to learn. But time goes on and they must hand in that assignment anyway. I've seen it happened countless times.
Now you can't deny that outsourcing (or using whatever means possible) to get the job done is a skill in itself. The art of hiring people might actually got billy gates where he is today.
It's fairly clear that particular person should've majored in Business Administration, not Computer Science.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It's things like this that really tick me off. This is probably worse than the reason "I'm doing it for the money" when I ask people why they're getting a degree in computer science. That seems like an indication they don't have a real desire to go beyond the minimum of what's required of them.
If someone is going to cheat their way through their course work, they need to stop wasting their money and go do something else.
Rent Me! Cheap Prices! $10 for Hello World!
When I took my programming classes, I rocked and wrote good code. I found that some other students were stealing my discarded code printouts from the garabage can in front of the printer. I eventually figured out they were stealing my work and left them a present :)
At the end of the semester, our lasy TA left our graded final project folders and CD's in a box in the hall outside his office and mine was stolen before I could collect it. No matter what you do, the slackers of the world are going to find the path of least resistance whether they beg, bribe, borrow, or steal to get it done.
The good news is that these losers won't last long when they are actually forced to do some work on their own and end up dropping out of IT or shifting to the call center or PC support. Academic dishonestly is a huge problem through all degree programs. I put the blame squarely on beer, women, Microsoft (Xbox), pool tables, bars, casinos, money, cars, P2P applications, sporting events, and general lack of caring. If we could just get rid of all these useless distractions and make academic dishonesty punishable by death, I think students could focus better.
As a freelancer, I often get cold calls from clients. But in more than one occasion, I was contacted by a group of graduating students who needed a system up IN A WEEK'S TIME for their final requirement.
I declined, of course, but I can't also help but sympathize with them (Hey, I was a student too). What struck me is that they reached THAT far in to the semester to realize that they can't deliver or needed any help.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Especially on the Windows platform. Microsoft documentation can blather on and on and cross-reference a plethora of other items without once giving a simple example. If a picture is "worth a thousand words", working "hello world" programs, with all the logistical hoopla for the target platform, are worth two pounds of documentation.
Many a time I have trolled the Internet for an example of something I needed to do in software. Often I would find an example that was close to what I needed. Out of dozens of "samples" only once have I been able to use what I found without completely re-writing it (lots of "example" code is not "professional" - logic tied to the UI, no error handling, just plain wrong in some cases, etc. etc.) Of course, if I do use anything even close to the original code I find, I have no problem keeping/adding proper attributions/credits/etc.
I think it would be perfectly fine to hire someone to write code for you, as an example to learn from - it's no different from hiring a tutor. But turning it in as your own work? Only if you are a business major, not a CS major :-)
There is a difference between the theoretical world of "jump thru this hoop to get result x", and the practical world of "get result x". The difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, I guess.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Outsourcing your homework is good experience for middle management. That way, when they get their job, they have experience in outsourcing programming and getting poor quality code back.
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Outsourcing a programming assignment would be a great assignment for the Project Manager and future CIO.
CIS 410: IT Managment and Outsourcing.
I'm not kiddding that much. I actually had a class in my CIS curriculum that had a mgt class that dealt with this issue.
Remeber, outsourcing can mean hiring IBM, EDS, or Joes Coding and Pizza to do your work.
It's a great age to learn this - probably Jr High teachers should do that demo to each new incoming class - "I can catch you out - it's this easy"
I'd be curious if it was all people outsourcing their homework to party or a combination of the following:
1. Horrible public university student-teacher ratios making assistance in the learning process not only non-existent, but also frowned upon. Said student achieving the boiling point in frustration and failing to have help, seeks aid, even if paid.
2. TAs teaching all the material, oftentimes in fields they have 0 training, with another person's lesson plan/material. I have endured too many upper division security courses now, with TAs that I rated between toilet paper and turd.
3. Onerous assignments by some professor that can barely speak english and instead should be enrolled in ESL 101, where merely deciphering the assignment requires a 10 year background in cryptanalysis and NSA supercomputers. "ha, I'll just give this to some indian coder, he'll understand my professor for sure!~"
4. Rote assignments that are equally dull, unchallenging and time-consuming
5. True students seeking more elegant/better/high-graded solutions. How many times have you cobbled together something that was ugly, functional, but practically a monstrosity. Spend a few more hours on it, with 0 forward progress, or outsource the work, then analyze the solution to see a better algorithm and incorporate it? Why get a C, when you can outsource some superior work, get a better grade, and learn more in the process?
I couldn't tell you the number of times I was asked to do peoples' homework in college; from Intro to Word work, to HTML, to VB.Net/C++/PHP programming (and this wasn't hard stuff - our school is far from having any good programming instruction, and only covers basics).
The pay would have been pretty good, too, but most of the instructors recognize my work (I was the among the few good programmers on campus - which doesn't say much for the campus :)), and I felt certain moral obligations.
The point is, it doesn't matter how they do it, people WILL cheat. Instructors need to devise better testing methods - for instance, we had a "programming olympics" where students would have to complete a practical programming exam on their computers, with random selections from a problem bank. This included simple algorithms, syntax familiarity tests, and smaller programs, as well as code commenting and debugging.
While not the end-all solution to the cheating problem, it could be a good step in the right direction. Of course, you have to worry about the security of such testing methods, but at least it offers SOME degree of assurance that the student might actually posess some knowledge.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
For a personal experience paper I hired this guy who emailed me a paper titled "the life of an underpaid outsourced homework slave" That didn't work so well.
At my school exams (midterm+final together) are usually worth at least 50% of the course grade, and you fail the course if you don't pass the exam component on its own (i.e. if you have 40% as your weighted average on the exams and 80% on the assignments, you still fail). I think that by the end of second year anyone not willing to do the work is rooted out.
I agree that it is wrong and they will get what is due to them, but is it really plagiarism as the article states. If you lookup the word, it always puts it as using someone elses work. If you own it, is it still someone elses? If you read the contracts for Rent-A-Coder, they will say that the coder gives up all rights to the work and it becomes the property of the purchaser.
This still doesn't change the fact that it is cheating, but like the article says this is done in business today. So are they underachievers or just putting a higher value on their own time and cannot afford to pay the wages without outsourcing it?
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
Programming is a lot of fun, wtf?
These folks are going for the positions that make the decision to outsource the coding to other countries. WTF is America gonna produce to the world when we lose our tech, manufacturing, etc. edge? Oh yeh, we'll still have the market cornered on neurosis, obesity, criminality, pollution, bling, and WMD and last but not least hypochristianity!
Life is a gift. And my Karma couldn't possibly be 'Positive'
This has been going on for a while. I ended up taking to ratting people out that do this. Try it for yourself - identify a homework assignment, and with luck, google will let you locate the university and class for which the assignment is for.
Sometimes, the idiots that do this will leave their class name and professor address on the assignment itself. Dumbasses.
It is extremely satisfying to receive correspondence from the professor in question. Often they place bids themselves, and submit "work". The student in question then gets identified... so much fun!
Maybe if someone didn't like the required classes, an enterprising person could hire someone to work on the boring projects, and spend their time on something more interesting. Like maybe even coding for money or producing an actual product to sell in the marketplace. They could do all this without sacrificing their grades, and still end up graduating, and still learn in the process. After all, a degree is mostly just a piece of paper, and most businesses will probably have a hard time hiring someone who doesn't have one. So you might as well at least go through the motions while still working on what you want. Not that I am advocating cheating in any way, just trying to think of this in a different way.
I was a TA an ancient history class at the college level for a couple of semesters. It was an intro class and we didn't expect the students to solve the mysteries of the ancients; it was mainly a course for them to learn how historians read sources and think about the past. I had a few near-identical conversations with kids at the beginning of the semester that went like this:
Student: So, I've come to your office hours today to find out what I need to do to get a B or better in this class.
Me: Well, you need to do the assigned readings, and you need to show me, in class discussion or in your essays, that you've thought about the readings.
Student: [Blind look of panic]
My one case of plagarism was from one of these guys. The problem is that we wanted to class to teach them how to read and how to think. They thought of it as a component of their GPA to help them get into business school. I can see the same mentality leading someone in CS to try to buy homework online.
jf
I can get paid to write "Hello World!" programs? Where do I sign up?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Absolutely! Imagine how well US Computer Science engineers would be positioned if instead of an acheivable amount of CS work given in a term, you were given slightly more work than you can complete, and $100. The deal would be: you can use or pocket the $100 however you see fit, but if you do choose to use RentACoder, you are JUST as responsible for the correctness, and have to fully disclose your sources.
That is real world training, and really drives in just how outsourcable your job is. What can YOU bring to the job that your manager can't find cheaper in India? After I had a wonderfully positive experience with RentACoder during my CS undergrad days in 1998 (not cheating, it was for an independent project), I realized that I could become a cube code monkey, or expand and accept that the rules changed. CS undergrads would be better off knowing this lesson early than finding out one day they had been outsourced.
As you suggest, we nailed a lot of people on the final exam.
Ah... this is great! It's only fair.
Personally, I wish schools and universities would simply go away as institutions. Let people learn in solitude and by freely associating with like-minded groups.
All you no-government libertarian freaks should be able to understand me. Get rid of the educational authority! Get rid of the educational governance and free education from its bounds. Let people learn how they will! Sure, what this means is that those who hire will no longer be able to screen resumes by your education "credentials". Wonderful! Maybe now a more honest method to find qualified people will develop.
As long as the so-called "credentials" are used to screen out people, then there will be incentive to cheat. Remove the incentive by ending the reliance on this bogus means of differentiation.
Let's put a stop to universities and colleges -- seriously.
Yes, you sound like someone who would lick a dog's balls because he can. Good luck with that, and don't get too many hairballs!
Well, that works just fine for when you don't "know something" such as a fact, figure, or definition. However, what about when you don't "understand something" such as a complex concept or how to apply a theory in practice? Do you just go ask somebody else?
Sure, you could try, but you probably won't simply find it with a quick Google search as you suggest. Consider how long it might take for somebody who does happen to understand it (well enough to teach it to you) to teach you this concept. That time is well spent for you, but not for your employer (nor necessarily your "teacher" in this case). This assumes, of course, that you know how to recognize somebody who actually does understand the concept, which is non-trivial at best; otherwise you'll still get it all wrong.
In the real world, if I want to hire you and you have a degree, I expect you to have been through that drill already for certain complex concepts, with professors (and indeed classmates) who are nominally proficient in their respective fields. If you haven't, you'll inevitably become a burden to your team.
I've outsource this posting, so please excuse my speling.
Synchronize your calendar and mobile phone via text messaging.
lol, anyone notice similarities between the 1HB pencil and the H1B visa?
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...oh, wait a minute - he already does.
Cheat, stay up all night partying, do drugs, drink, eat unhealthily. I love it. In 10 years, I'll be in great shape, working my way to the top of whatever company I'm at while the cheaters with their pathetic work ethic slowly become poor and fat. Keep your eye out for me. I'll be the hard working one with the gorgeous wife and great job.
...then it's a sign that you're not teaching an obscure enough programming language. Using C++ is like asking the students to cheat. You want to require all answers in Unicon, or Lambda Prolog, or (worst of all) POPLOG-11.
Actually, I have two bachelor's degrees. One is in Computer Science. The other is in Business Management.
It certainly would be far, far easier to fake your way through Business Management.
However, Business Management certainly is not going to pay more with just a bachelor's degree coming straight out of college.
In real life, IT people will have to outsource coding, support, etc. These guys have an edge in that they already have experience with outsourcing projects.
I put in the long hours and hard work to really earn my degree, but many do not. Employers are not blind -- they realize that a lot of CS "grads" are total nitwits.
Your degree matters a lot for Job #1. After that, what matters is how much you've demonstrated that you can actually do.
What amazes me is that some people are willing to spend *vast* amounts of money to buy themselves a university education. They have purchased the right to listen to famous researchers reading off the contents of their textbooks to them. They've purchased the right to have those researchers made available to answer questions of any sort. Neither of these are *essential* to learning, but they're handy tools -- and damned expensive ones. Then these students to try to subvert the entire system by not doing any work or learning anything. They're going to get exactly one job with that (assuming that they can game the interview as well). After that, the world knows that they just aren't competent. There just isn't any alternative to learning material.
Do students really think that employers are really that stupid? That if they manage to get through one interview, that that an employer will never question the fact that these graduates just can't do their job?
If someone is cheating, it hurts their future badly -- they are going to have to compete in the future with the knowledge and skills that they are acquiring now. They have retained expensive people to help them learn. Why throw that away?
Professors are *not* the enemy -- they're there to do what they can to assist students in learning. Heck, they can't even ram an education down a student's throat -- the student needs to learn themselves. A professor can at best help a student acquire skills.
I think that many people see the phrase "cheating hurts only you" and write it off as propaganda to try to get people to conform. They think that they've found an easy path to success. It really is not. The harm that cheating causes the reputation of other students or the institution is not that great, but the harm that not knowing your subject material causes you is enormous.
One of the most knowledgeable technical people I know lacks even a high school degree (not that there's any form of inverse correlation with degree -- I know sharp PhDs too). That non-high-school-graduate, however, reads engineering texts constantly, designs digital circuits and reverse-engineers devices in his free time, along with spending volunteer time helping people design networks. I think that the most overriding factor in how solid someone is in their field is how *interested* they are in it. People that spend their own time tinkering away in their field get damned good at it, and all other factors kind of fade into the background.
That's one reason why, I think, that so many Linux folk are so technically competent. It has nothing to do with "knowing Linux" -- Linux is just another operating system. It's that a lot of people that use Linux are technology hobbyists, people who like pulling things apart and trying out new ideas and building new things. It's just that a lot of people who treat technology as not just a profession, but also a hobby, wind up here. Linux is the ham radio of today's generation, the magnet that attracts hobbyists. Open Source, too acts as such a trap for interested people -- it's not necessarily that the source being open magically makes people competent, but that the sorts of people that do volunteer open source work are usually the tinkerers I'm speaking of, and that these people tend to value being able to poke around at source code.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
At least at Carnegie Mellon, where programming courses were required for a vast majority of the students. Majored in Bio, History, Business..? Yup, you had to take programming. To me it seemed that these people were the ones that were likely to get someone else to do their programming assignments for them. The students who majored in CS? yeah, right.
yah know i guess with the whole cheating thing all you do is hurt yourself. for example i took a grade 11 CS course last year and i had to cheat to pass so what do i remeber from the class NOTHING. people need to realize even though we have all of these shortcuts now, good hard work is what will pay off in the end
In the "real" world, a customer pays for the result. A working product. Class assignments are not the product, if they were, then the value of the assignment would be less than a penny since the instructor typically already has a working solution to the problem (and probably many from past students).
The student is assigned the work to demonstrate their prowess at solving and implementing the solution to a problem. The product is the demonstration. The code provided by the student to the grader is in effect a proxy for the demonstration, and is only valid in that role if actually created by the student.
Beyond morals and ethics, the two are not even equivalent economically.
I realized that I could become a cube code monkey, or expand and accept that the rules changed. CS undergrads would be better off knowing this lesson early than finding out one day they had been outsourced.
:-)
This does, of course, assume that the unique skills that you bring to the table outside of CS provide better value than those that can be found in, say, India.
And language isn't such a barrier anymore. I work with Europeans and Asians who speak English as a language other than their first on a daily basis, and English is pretty widespread these days.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I've seen a few computer science who had been doing the computer science homeworks for their boyfriend / girlfriend.
It is just the different reasons for outsource (or shall I call it "insource"?) - either you do it for money or for relationship...
Personally, I was asked once by one of my friend (a girl, but NOT even my girlfriend) to do cisco related homeworks...
Sure, let the entrepreneurial students outsource all their projects. The wake-up call will be on them when, during their first real-world interview, I put them in a room, alone, for 20 mins with a whiteboard and ask them to pseudocode an algorithm or data structure.
The students who aren't interested enough in the -science- of a computing project might bet better off majoring in Business Administration and, yes, doing the outsourcing. Leave the architecting, the design, and (maybe) the coding to the real future computer scientists.
but when you're a Professor of a class with 200+ students, you don't exactly have the time to sort through 200 programming assignment to see who cheated. At the uni I attend, we have an autograder program in place to grade assignments. The actual source code goes off to some website and compared to other students (and past students) code. If you're caught you face serious academic consequences.
While learning about all these designs, theories, and models is fun and all, it doesn't really advance a CS student's knowledge. Employers wont be happy when they hire a student who listed compiler development as a skill learned, but has never actually gone through and written one.
The fact is, at the universities that care, they'll take steps to insure code produced by students is as "original" as possible. This'll weed out the weak links. Universities and colleges that don't care enough to invest in such technology simply wont be as well recieved in the workplace. It's a self balancing system, even if it's response time isn't instantaneous.
They are practicing for the real world where their job will be outsourced to someone in Bangalore.
I have no problem with these kids though, gives people who KNOW how to code an easier way. Also checkout http://thedailywtf.com/ for samples of what these people will become.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
How fitting: Outsourced homework for an outsourced career.
It may, unfortunately, actually be good practice for the real world because in the real world you can and may have to manage outsourced projects there.
Table-ized A.I.
Funny how on the Colbert Report tonight, education was the focus of their program. They flashed back to the interview they had with John Stossel where he reported on how the Europeans "cleaned the clocks" of American children on standardized tests. Can this plagarism explosion be apart of what's happening in public schools of America? Now that we have the most comprehensive and accessible encyclopedia in the world Wikipedia, I know of no University Student who hasn't used the 'Copy Paste' strategy in helping out with their papers.
Talking as a 3rd year Computer Science major right now, I can't think of much CS work that could be 'outsourced'. Although I have to admit, I currently attend a small liberal arts university in Canada, my course load this semester consists of the following: Software Engineering, Robotics, Principles of Programming Languages, Computer Ethics (great class), Advanced Algorithms.
Honestly, there's no way you're going to learn Scheme for example, and pass your final in programming languages by outsourcing your homework to someone else, you simple won't pass. And for the rest of the courses in CS, very few actually have 'outsourcable' homework, alot of it depends on your understanding of the material. IMHO, if all your homework is 'outsourcable' than your CS degree might as well be done at Devry.
"Many, many, *many* are in it for the money, or because people keep telling them computers are the place to be. "
Good thing we have outsourcing to cure that particular illusion.
I just today had my instructor (Ph.D candidate) at University of North Texas tell me that several (read more than 3) Ph.D. candidates were caught outsourcing their work last semester. All of them were expelled, and some were foreigners so they were sent home. Apparently they didn't change the code they turned in very much and had identical variables, and code structure all over the place.
If only I could outsource me being at school.
I've seen too many applicants with BSc or Masters degrees that couldn't build an app if their life depended on it. Good grades don't show if someone is bright, capable, or reliable. One of the best developers I've worked with dropped out of university because of two things, money and he wanted to learn something useful. Theory is only the beginning of a career; it means nothing if you don't know how to put it in practice. Does my boss care if I know what a red black tree or a Duff's device is? I doubt it.
The first case involved somebody who was soliciting solutions to assignments for the current semester as well as previous ones. I'm not sure if the person was just confused or was trying to stockpile solutions for another semester. Still, he had put up one of my assignments. After I contacted rentacoder about having it taken down, they essentially told me that they had no proof the poster was involved in cheating. In the end, I filed a DMCA request (came in handy here) to have my copyrighted material (the handout) removed from the site at rentacoder's suggestion.
Unfortunately, I never found out how the person soliciting the solutions was connected to my course. I did find out his name and some posts on craigslist for "homework help" through the help of Google. My department looked the guy's name up in their records and while he had taken some courses in the past, he had actually never graduated from the department (appeared to have dropped out after 1 or 2 courses). Still, he was claiming in his ads to be a graduate of the department.
Interestingly enough, the whole thing was brought to my attention by some random guy who was browsing for real work on rentacoder. He claimed to hate cheaters and how they get by while everybody else had to work. I would never have even known about it if that random guy hadn't tipped me off.
There was another case though that was MUCH more interesting. A student who was not doing well in the class had posted a request for somebody to complete one of the projects. I don't want to give too many revealing details, but in the end the guy who actually did the work (and took the student's money for it) tipped him off to me! He claimed to hate cheaters a lot too and laughed all the way to the bank I'm sure.
The moral of these stories I suppose is that you really can't trust the shady people who are trafficking in homework solutions.
Interesting, I had a teacher who actually encouraged that sort of thing . It was an engineering class in our senior year, and the teacher thought that we had a lot to learn about the real world. He said, to get anything done, either (1) do it yourself, (2) write a program to do it, or (3) get someone else to do it for you.
Then he gave us some tedious homework. Most of us opted for option (2). But he allowed it only for a couple of projects.
I welcome my artificial masters, but only if I get to write the obligatory one-liners. I'll steal them from movies like Kill Bill, Star Wars and The Terminator of course. "You might not be able to fight like a samurai, but you can at least die like a samurai."
Homework usually doesn't count for a big part of a course, it's preparation for the test. Outsourcing homework makes about as much sense as outsourcing physical exercise or outsourcing an appendectomy--it may avoid short term unpleasantness, but it fails to achieve its long term purpose.
(In contrast, when companies outsource, they may just care about the product, so outsourcing is arguably a correct strategy for them.)
Hmmm... Maybe I should check out this site, do 2 homeworks a day, quit my day job and party the rest of the time ?
Really?
The business folks at my old company were SMOKING the programmers as far as pay rates were concerned, and apparently got all sorts of cool benefits after I left (executive retreats to the Florida keys monthly).
The reason that they don't do that is because you're supposed to be getting a degree in computer science. A computer science degree isn't intended to be vocational training in programming, and it certainly isn't about making business decisions.
Nobody said that the three major areas of CS were Theory, Systems, Artificial Intelligence and... oh, a fourth, Outsourcing.
The reason that they don't do that, is that the point is for you to learn computer science. Life's lessons come from the School of Hard Knocks.
but as for me, homework was not just an exercise to pass the course, it was a chance to prove that I knew the material and could do the work to pass the course.
Seems to me, anybody that could be proved to use this kind of service should fail automatically!
In many schools, the "code of student conduct" that forbids this kind of thing, is a *contract*.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Like that there will be more interesting subjetcs than this crap.
My CSC316 teacher was talking about this in class this afternoon, before the article was posted. The CS department at my school is fairly large, and they already have programs to compare assignments to code produced by fellow students, previous graduates, and code posted on the web.
Teachers aren't stupid, and I suspect they'll find a way to check for this before long.
The sad part is that according to my old java 1 professor, they flunk about 100 students a semester on cheating alone.
The prof. I used to TA for always gave out the java classes as sample solutions for almost all the assignments. However, he also added methods that looked impressive but totally unnecessary and many times did nothing to the programs. There were always a couple students a term who turned in a code that had those methods in it. Most common excuse was that they asked some friends to do homework for them (which is as bad as decompiling, anyway).
I am surprised to see this article on WSJ via Slashdot. I had written about exactly the same topic on 20th October 2005. My article was titled:
Outsourcing Homework to India. It mentions the Rentacoder issue - "If you glance at rentacoder you will find several homework assigments up for outsourcing. In fact they have a Personal Project / Homework Help category. At present there are 88 open jobs in Homework category."
I wonder if WSJ writer has plagiarized my article. What do you think?
This made me laugh at first though it is a sad matter. Yes rent-a-coder is full of write-my-homework projects and has been this way ever since I first found out about it ( several years ago ). However, it is not the only place where you can pay someone to do your homework for you. There are countless sites that sell already written essays on pretty much any topic that is covered in college. The difference is that those essays are sold to many people and the chance of getting caught with one of them is huge. ...
Anyway, the honor code at most colleges/universities has a clause agains cheating an getting someone else to write yoru homework is most deffinitelly considered cheating. If you get caught and you are really lucky you will be put on academic probation and you will fail the class. Some schools will kick you out for cheating and no you do not get your money back. So if anyone is thinking of using rent-a-coder or any other place like that, I'd strongly advise against it. You might get lucky but in most cases the risk is really not worth it. Plus write your damn homework man
I think I can make an addition here. At the university, I often exchange my programs and papers with my colleagues; we analyze each other's works and then discuss them and share the experience.
:-) One can easily get over this, but at least it's better than nothing.
A few days ago, I was chatting with another student from the same uni (but a couple of years younger), she takes the same class and was assigned a task similar to the one I had when I was at her age.
I found out that she purchased from someone a bundle of projects for that class... And among them was one signed with my name.
And then I realized that somebody took the product of my work without my knowing it, and then fucking SOLD it to somebody, so that they could just change the name and give it as their own... Dammit..
That happened to me before too, but in none of the cases the project was paid for.
In my university there are multiple places where you can print out your stuff in exchange for a small fee. Well, it seems that it is THE place where all the leaks happen, the guys do a ctrl+C / ctrl+V before they do a ctrl+P.
Conclusions:
- never print your stuff on computers that do not belong to you
- use some sort of copy protection.. a PDF that doesn't allow you to copy/print comes into mind
Guys, now I happen to be on the other end of the barricades amid this DRM conflict, and it doesn't feel good.
The saddest poem
When these candidates seek a job at my company, they will not get past the first interview.
They will be alone in a room with a coding assignment and outsourcing will NOT be an option.
From what one of the lectures at my uni told us:
They found full specs plastered across websites and a lecturer at an Indian University contacted them after finding advertisements, with full assignment specs, posted at the Indian Uni on the CS department notice boards offerring payment for assignments. After looking at available options they found their was little they could do at the time unless they located who posted the advertisement. The solution now is for assignments to be posted on password protected webpages with clear copyright notices about reproduction. If they see the assignment spec anywhere again, particularly in relation to websites they are "apparently" planning to go after them for copyright infringement to put a stop to it and punish the infringers.
On a side note, when some of the lectures come down to the bar they tell some funny stories including about classes they are no longer allowed to teach such as first year postgrad computing as they failed too many students for cheating. This is in Australia where ungrads pay a lot less than postgrads due to government subsidys - which are slowly going away.
All lectures fail students for cheating if they are caught, some are less lax in the work they put into checking however.
37 - what does it stand for really...
What's that phrase?
"Good programmers write code. Great ones steal it"
Might need to be revised to include
"Capitalistic lazy-assed frat-boys shell out for it"
Describe ways in which this fail to be fair for various combinations of people types in a group.
Programming Labs full of computers that aren't connected to the internet.
Yes, it would suck.
But it would stop the cheating. You'd have to monitor them of course, but it just goes to show that if a certain percentage will go that far to cheat, you have to do something.
Maybe if you catch them doing it - which is easy enough if each person has to explain their assignment, why they did it the way they did - you could force them to do future programming assignments in the lab, under supervision (that the student will have to pay for) until they won't ever do it again.
I must admit I have been guilty of quite blatant plagarism for my GCSE in Computer Studies - as was everyone else in the class.
I think for our coursework we had to write a short game in some kind of BASIC languauge on the RM Nimbus machines. In my defence the teacher we had was a great person but an utterly useless teacher, he had a doctorate and had escaped from Iraq in the fuel tank of a truck and was a very intelligent man but unfortunatley he just wasn't cut out for teaching or indeed any role where he was required to explain anything in terms simple enough for a class of secondary school students to understand.
We spent most of the lessons playing the games which came on demo disk with the RM Nimbus. Because they were written in BASIC all the source code was right there to "learn" from so when I realised we had to do some kind of coursework I just modified the source code for all the games to play different sounds, be in different colours and added some new things to some of them although any idiot could see instantly they were more or less identical. I handed this in as my coursework but before I did I gave individual games from my set ( I had about 8 games ) to everyone else in the class for their coursework. Amazingly this apparently went unnoticed because I ended up getting an A grade GCSE for it.
I had this same teacher as the invigilator for my A Level Physics practical exam, he came round and asked everyone about the experiments they were setting up and then if he didn't think they were doing it right he would explain how to do it better and in some cases set up all the equipment for people and tell them what to write. This is definitely not allowed but was very nice of him.
I used to do quite a lot of work on rentacoder and got (and still get) a lot of people basically asking me to do thier homework for them usually at ridiculousy short time intervals and very low pay. Some tried to disguise the homework as other things while some had attached worksheets blantantly written by a teacher/lecturer. I complaied to rentacoder at one point saying that this was probably against the policy of virtually every university, college and school out there and as a student myself if I was caught "outsourcing" my homework i'd be kicked out. They never replied to me. Their ToCs ban ppl from posting jobs which create software for spamming, spyware etc but not for doing someone elses homework.
This is truly disturbing. What a bunch of losers. _Most_ of my CS course were very interesting and there was plenty of opportunity to get the source code from some place else, but all of my classmates (I had very small classes, in some cases myself and 4 others) would never have done this. I doubt anyone who reads/participates on slashdot would do this either. The real nerds want to learn. This is a sign of what is to come and why American students continuously score lower than students in other countries. We are truly becoming fat lazy Americans. As Perry Ferrell says: "We'll make great pets."
I read about an interesting combination with this idea similar to this recently:r -way-through-scool-with-distance-education/
http://www.lifeaftercoffee.com/2005/10/05/buy-you
Basically, combine what's written above with distance or online education and suddenly outsourcing your whole degree becomes simple.
When I was in College, I had a lot of first hand experience with this. I made quite a bit of money doing other people's homework, coding their projects, doing pretty much all their school work. The end result: I have 1.5 years out of college, I am a senior developer because of the experience I gained by doing so much programming in school... and my friends from college... well... Last I knew most were in Retail, or very low end support jobs because they did not learn... their loss, my gain :)
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
If they can't complete the assignments on their own, I'll bet 95% of them won't even recognize incorrect answers or implementations.
I say we go en masse to RentACoder, bid cheaply, and write horribly incorrect code. It'll be a nice helping of getting what's coming to ya, and we'll get paid a little to boot!
In the future: US has to outsource jobs because its students outsourced their homework
Outsourced:
String myName = "Ishtabar Gupta";
Not Outsourced:
String myName = "Bill Smith";
Another way-- look for "With Warm Regards" as a "sincerely" replacement.
"Take home finals abdicate the instructors responsibility to make cheating as hard as possible and catch it if they can."
Where do you get the idea that making cheating as hard as possible is a professor's responsibility?
You are allowing parents and students to abdicate THEIR responsiblity to behave correctly.
I don't know why you think it's a professor's responsibility to modify your behavior, but college isn't high school.
Adults go to college, and they're expected to act like adults when they are there. Why do you keep insisting that professors should treat adults like children?
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Some of the Rent a Coder users appear to be outsourcing their way through school, at low costs--probably less than $100 per assignment.
:P The other $50 would've been long since spent on games.
Oh, man. In my college days, I would've been lucky to see $50 at one time
"I'm very insulted by your comment. You have made my four years of university sound like a joke and you've also insulted not only my education, but the education of every American and Canadian. I only wish you would have had to go through one PARTIAL course which I've taken..."
Oh, this is cute. You're insulted and yet slashdot in this story and others insults other professions all the time. Guess it doesn't feel so good when your the insulted intead of the insultee.
I am a high school student in Switzerland as an exchange student, and I am one of these "Outsourcees". I hava a coder account on RentACoder, and regularly spend two or three hours a week writing code for these "CS Majors". It gives me a great way to practice coding before I enter a CS program (I'm hoping for Stanford), and it provides a nice extra cash flow to my overseas accounts.
Not having actually yet gone to college, I can still admit that I borrowed a buddies source code and refactored it, and handed that in as my own. So, having sat on both sides of the fence, I really don't see a problem with either side.
Any university worth its salt gives practical exams. You walk in, sit down, and are handed a programming assignment you have two or three hours to complete, one which includes all topics for the course. If you fail the practical, you fail the course, regardless of what your grade is with the practical figured into it. Most practicals don't even allow crib sheets. Anyone who outsources or otherwise shirks their homework won't be able to pass the practical because they won't know how to do it under pressure in a short time frame. So where's the problem?
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
My advice to you would be to stay on as a graduate student, get that PhD and go straight into teaching. Sure that has its own set of problems, but I'm sure it's a lot nicer than the alternative. Let the morons who outsourced their homework go out and deal with the IT grind.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm 20 and havent been to college yet. When I was 19, I put my CV of various skills I learned from tinkering at home (various operating systems, some scripting languages, etc) on several job sites and got a call a few days later from the company I have been working in for over a year.
I am now one of the senior systems administrators and get to fly out to our offices around the world to improve the infrastructure and communications and even get to work many days from home and not having to come in. My job basically consists of making sure our servers are up, finding ways to improve the infrastructure with opensource or cost effective solutions and some coding to test and glue various technologies.
Now, I may not be paid exactly what I deserve, but its several factors more than graduates typically get the first 5 years or so out of college so the question is this, if I have the knowledge and experience, a degree seems to just teach me that what I do now is bad and teach me skills I'm not going to use in the field. Why would I want that?
If a course uses a cheat check program such as MOSS, multiple students outsourcing assignments to the same place will likely get the served by the same coder, hand in the same program, and get caught. That is, the more students that outsource in a class, the greater the chance of getting caught.
Stories:
1. I know of one TA who did rent-a-coding on the side, and happened across an assignment from one of his classes posted. He bid, got the contract, and reported to the professor.
2. Sometimes it is the student who is "not the sharpest knife in the drawer" who outsources. I found a student posting an outsourcing bid who was easily traceable. I contacted the student before a bid was accepted.
3. In a C++ class, I had a cluster of programs flagged as similar by MOSS. Upon investigating I found that a student had posted a solution on a web site. Only one of the cluster compiled. The others failed because their browsers had removed everything in the #include statements between the angle brackets. The students did not recognize the problem and had not even tried to compile the programs before handing them in. In that class, a program which didn't even compile was worth nothing anyway so their cheating yielded programs which were worth nothing. Their plagiarizing yielded a zero for the course and a note to the Dean.
Check out an interesting article about out-sourcing homework help in the Communications of the ACM: Academic Dishonesty and the Internet.
Come back in another 20 years when your idealism has been replaced by the reality of the corporate work environment.
For a large number of people work is not everything; for many people it is a paycheck. Assuming that someone who is not "passionate" about the work they do is also inately inept or not competent is assinine. Sure, there is this mythical "passion" for work that exists, but how many people actually find it? The numbers I assume are pretty low. Considering that, people still are able to "operate" day in and day out.
There is a large difference between being dis-satisfied at you job as technical lead for a large scale software development project and being dis-satisfied mopping sh*t off of the floor in the bathroom of a fast-food restaurant.
But, hey, if I don't have "passion", I should do the latter, right?
Programming is oh so common, me and mine at the palace prefer to get ethnic minorities to do our programming, some also clean the place from time to time hmmm. I enjoy being a blue blood programmer, I've completed major projects with no lines of code, it makes debugging a dream. Who am I kidding I'm so good I don't need a debugger!!! Oh talking on slashdot how common, I'm off to shoot some foxes on my estate (council estate).
Ta ta
..a computer programmer actually produces something useful, whereas alot of other majors (political science, business, communications - looking at you here) are full of people shoveling bullshit in the form of shifting paradigms for strategized markitecture. It does an extreme disservice to the human race to reward ignorance and apathy, yet we as a nation do it every single day and we are going to pay sooner than later.
I tried using this service. The majority of the jobs submitted seemed
to be people's homework assignments. I was unable to land even a single
job for less than what I would get at mcDonalds. People who can survive
on pennies per day were willing to work much cheaper than I could.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
But I bet you had a number of worry-warts trying to discourage you from jumping into the field you're in without first wasting a couple of years and piles of cash on post-secondary education.
Congrats!
-FL
Sure, let the entrepreneurial students outsource all their projects. The wake-up call will be on them when, during their first real-world interview...
That's exactly my attitude towards businesses outsourcing their work. The wake-up call is on them when they try to deploy/maintain the products they outsource.
it's not so easy always..
sometimes your University (I don't live in the US) won't back you up and getting someone expelled is a hard process that creates a lot of bad blood.
so I have another technique: If I find cheaters I give them big fat zeros.. if I can't really prove it I ignore it.
But on exam day cheaters tend to have a lot of difficulty passing.. I have noticed.. Eventually all cheaters are caught.. because they can't handle the coursework.
Okay...so you leave them alone for 20 minutes...they pull out their net-connected cell phone, Google a page about what you asked them to write, and cheat their way through that too. From someone who did a fair bit of cheating in high school and a little bit in college, unless a person is determined to absolutely, positively make sure you don't cheat and dedicates a large part of their time to it, people will still find a way to cheat.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 SU CK IT MP AA
She was from India, and was at my university on a full scholarship. She sent every single one of her assignments back to a friend in India who would do her work for her. She worked in the dean's office, and was able to get copies of all old tests, and many times even got copies of new tests before they were given out.
.class files around for other people to test with.
.class file. Thankfully for me, she admitted this to the professor, and I didn't receive an F for the class.
I was taking a networking class with her my last semester. The very last assignment we had was 25% of our grade, and it was an application that required the students to work together. We had to create a sort algorithm that was network based, and had to adhere to a standard given to us by our professor. Most of the people in the class didn't feel like sitting around in the labs to let others test their applications, so they would just leave the
I was one of those people. So, after the exam, I get an email from my professor telling me that I would be receiving an F for the class due to plagerism (again, this was my last semester). It seems myself and another student had nearly the exact same code. This of course, was the student from India who was cheating her way through all of her classes. It seems she decompiled by
She was caught cheating in her robotics class the next semester, and she was caught cheating in another class the semester before.
I'm sad, but not suprised, to see that the university cited in this article is NJIT, my almer mater. I think there are a number of reasons why kids, in tech schools especially, turn to this kind of thing at university.
Firstly, there is an increasing disconnect between what you do in school, and what will be doing in the workplace. Getting a degree is seen as a necessary evil that you have to undergo in order to get a job in the "real world. NJIT is a research university, and as such it generally hires professors who do good reseach over professors who are on the cutting edge of technology and practice. As such, it houses a number professors who have been out of the work force for years, if not decades.
Secondly, the research focus of the school means that professors are often focused on publishing papers and getting grants rather than putting effort into being a good teacher. Related to this is the fact that applications for tenure (a secure, full time position) at a university are evaluated based on the number of papers published and grants received.
The other important measure when a faculty member applies for tenure is student evaluations. Soooo, teachers have two choices: work very very hard to make their subject and their course material exciting and appealing to students so that they get good evaluations, OR make the course really easy and give out lots of high grades so that students will be happy and give them good evaluations.
Unfortunately many professors choose the latter, meaning that students do not learn what they should, and often *have to cheat in order to get to upper level courses, or courses with teachers who are more demanding (teachers who will likely get bad student evaluations because the course was too hard, making it more unlikely they will get a full time position at the school...sigh).
Anyway, there are a lot of other factors involved in plagiarism and cheating, but it seems that it is related to a fundamental problem in some universities, where student learning is not a priority for either the students or the professors.
ntxt
This is only a trend that will continue - not just in business, but also in our personal lives. As technology progresses forward the human race progress in reverse. We have outsourced our labor to overseas because it is cheaper. We have outsourced our parenting responsibilities because we want to work harder for a house that is no longer a house, but a McMansion. We have outsourced our house hold duties because the McMansion that we bought is too much of a house to clean. The generation that is following in our footsteps are only doing what they see their parents do - a repeated pattern of behavior where by throwing money at the problem. If a solution can be bought, then why not? Computer sceince projects, term papers, or even a federal contracts all boil down to getting something accomplished. There is a goal and there is also a deadline. It's not plagiarism if the work is sub-contracted. Plagiarism is outright stealing, contract or sub-contract is only a means to an end, which in this is more time to do things that we really want to do, which at this point I have no idea what to do because I am reading slashdot.
Once they have the code they can read it to make sure it actually does what it is supposed to, rewrite it to their liking, etc.
Also, it may be a situation where they know how to do the assignment, but want to spend their time on other assignments.
I have kind of wondered about this sort of outsourcing in my own work, but I am wondering about the degree of independent thought of the coders and what kind of spec I need to supply.
One of the projects I have is implementing a wait-for-vertical retrace in Java. Java has BufferStrategy, but you only get vertical sync on page flips in full-screen mode and only on Windows. I have gotten a wait-for-vertical retrace working under Debian Linux as a JNI module written in C++ using OpenGL/GLX/X calls, and I would like to port this to Solaris, OS X, etc. So can I tell some dude "Here are the C++ source files, here is my makefile, here is a Java test program, go make this work on all of the other platforms by finding where the headers and libs are and/or download the needed drivers to make it work or tell me why it won't work on a particular platform, and if GLX/X on OS X doesn't support vertical retrace, tell me if there is some other hack to use on OS X"?
A lot of what I spend my development time on is stuff like that -- the rote coding to a spec is something I know how to pound out the code and don't need to outsource. For large projects, one should draft and maintain specs instead of just hacking code until it sticks, but it seems the writing the specs is the bulk of the work and the outsource coder is a sort of human 4GL. And for tricky stuff -- that is using libraries and OS features that are not well documented -- there is no substitute for hacking.
"But I do believe that the decision making process and/or the results of said decisions in the buisness world are often subjective (after all, how do you can you quantify people skills?), thus making it harder to identify the talented from the not-so-talented when compared to the technical side."
That's what my psychology/sociology degree is for. It's a "soft" science, but not as "soft" as people think.
The sad fact is that when you cheat, you are really only cheating yourself. If you do not gain the knowledge that is taught in a course, it is your loss. You paid for the course, and did not get the benefit (the knowledge) that was there for the taking.
The most important thing that you gain from a college education is learning skills. By learning a variety of subjects, you gradually develop skill at learning new things. Learning is the only professional skill that really matters during the longer term (20-40 years) of your career. If you don't develop skill at learning, your career will plateau or fail very early.
The other observation that many seem to miss is that the easiest way to get an 'A' in most courses is to actually read the text and learn the material. Reading most undergraduate computer-science textbooks only takes a few days, even if you are unfamiliar with the material. (The math books take a little longer, of course.) Then, if you actually know the material, writing a programming assignment normally only takes a few hours.
The fact that cheating seems to be common has had an effect on the courses, though. I now give exams. It is amazing how a 3-hour exam can separate the people who know the subject from those who don't. I try to design the test so that I can write it in about 10-15 minutes. The students who really learned the material usually write it in less than an hour, and thank me for the easy test on the way out. But some of the students take nearly the whole three hours, and turn in messy piles of disorganized scribbling. I almost don't have to grade the papers -- I could just note the time that each student turns in the test and leaves the room.
That's why I qualified my comments by writing, "However, Business Management certainly is not going to pay more with just a bachelor's degree coming straight out of college."
The managers you're talking about likely did not get those positions straight out of college. Companies are not in the practise of taking fresh college BBAs and making them boss. More than likely, those managers worked up through the ranks -or- they returned to college to get their MBAs. (And that is not an exclusive or.)
Either way, the comp sci graduate will earn more upon graduation with a 4-year degree than a business grad of the same level. Further, that comp sci grad has just as much opportunity to advance as the business grad. Further still, graduate business schools will accept both candidates with comp sci and business undergrad degrees, which again translates to just as much opportunity for both.
The problem with comp sci salaries versus BBA salaries is that the comp sci graduate wants to do fairly low-level development work for all his career. The BBA graduate does not want to do low-level work, but instead wants to become boss and run the company. That is why there is a difference in wages over time.
Was she able to figure out the decompiler on her own, or did she need someone else to do that for her too?
I think I would choose the guy in Manila with practical experience over a recent CS grad who can code the hell out of a bubble sort in Java but can't do jack shit when you sit down behind him and say "just code a fucking email form; the test starts now.'
It is pride that seperates out coders. If you code for a paycheck, you are not coding with pride. If you code for pride, then you always have a better product.
Fight Spammers!
Don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me.
Well.......
I don't know. I've seen this from multiple angles.
I have a friend who jumped out of the M.Eng program here, and she makes a low 6 figure salary as a banker. I have another who jumped out and works at Microsoft now for a high 5 figure salary.
The VP of my old company certainly worked his way up and did MBA first, but we also had several people who've never done a technical thing in their life in charge, including a girl who had just finished her MBA, straight out of college, no work experience. She had a private office and made, eh, probably more than I (though, I've really no clue). She was a program manager, which put her in charge of a lot of people who'd been working 20+ years as software engineers.
In fact, almost nobody who was a software engineer when I came to that company wanted to stay in engineering when I left. (I left to get my M.Eng, and now am off for a PhD).
I certainly can see my friends who are making big money wanting to stay in tech, but we are all graduates from a top school. My undergraduate institution was much more humble, and I can hardly see anybody who was working at my old job wanting to stay in it.
Most people in tech these days do NOT stay at a job rising through the ranks. In Southeastern VA, you're practically expected to float your resume ever 3 years. In DC, it's more like every 9 months. This is so you can see if you'll find a job with a higher pay rate. This is what the people really do. I've seen them in action.
I'd love to say that most of industry works like that. It's how it probably should work, but in my experience, only the top companies work like that, and the people who have access to those companies are few and fortunate.
Crikey! I should've thought of this a long time ago. Ah well, I breezed through everything except compiler construction anyway. That one was a toughie.
We run a small numerical website (www.codecogs.com), nothing the size of RentaCoder but never the less, we frequently get direct request or forum postings for C code that's very clearly homework - deleted straight off.
...."
What gets me, is some don't even have the intelligence to disguise the problem they need solving with us often receiving the exact text from their course work, i.e. "Question 10, Write a program in C to extract
Furthermore I'm struck at how bloody rude these people tend to be, esp given they are cheating. You'd think that if this is your approach to getting through Uni, then the first two words of the English language you might learn are 'Please' and 'Thank you'.
So far I hope we've not helped anyone.
Cheers
Will
As a programmer, I was thinking the same thing. Where do I post my rates?. J/K
"Life's lessons come from the School of Hard Knocks."
Yes, but the problem with what you said here is that not being prepared for these hard knocks in college, means you can lose your livelihood.
The parent poster isn't wrong - you can learn Theory, Systems, and AI all you want, but there is no way you, as a coder, can prove to your boss that you're worth more than some $1/day East Indian coder - that East Indian coder can acquire absolutely positively every last skill that you have. Every single skill, period. S/he can, and eventually s/he will. I can't possibly emphasize that enough.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"That is real world training, and really drives in just how outsourcable your job is. What can YOU bring to the job that your manager can't find cheaper in India?"
There is nothing in the world and beyond that you cannot bring to your job that an employer can't find cheaper in India. Everything you know how to do, from what code you make to how it's made to even low bugs-per-line counts to debugging and support, can be learned completely by programmers in India.
Right now there are some things that you might be doing that East Indians aren't known for doing yet, and thus people still cling to the question "What can YOU bring to the job that your manager can't find cheaper in India?" as if they can still hope to answer that sufficiently to get or keep a job.
Meanwhile, East Indians are learning English, graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, and getting on-the-job experience with coding at the expense of millions of American coders who are being idled, and at the expense of millions more potential coders who are avoiding the profession altogether because of offshoring. East Indians are learning what their shortcomings are, and with competition coming from poorer places like Eastern Europe, they're inevitably going to rise to the occasion and iron them out - because, unlike us Americans, they are being given a completely free pass to employment so they can train up.
So, back to that question. "What can YOU bring to the job that your manager can't find cheaper in India?" Eventually you will find the illusions of differences between East Indian coders and American coders are gone and that the answer to that question is "absolutely nothing."
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Sure, but that's not what the degree is about. The degree is about computer science.
This guy isn't advocating "learning the material" or "learning that nobody really values you," he's advocating "learning how to outsource." That just has nothing to do with computer science.
I wouldn't want my students learning everything in the course, oh, except for that one really difficult assignment that they hated. They can outsource that.
That doesn't teach them anything that will help them in the real world. If anything, it teaches them that they can slack off and get away with it.
If they're learning CS then you're right. But I think that learning CS at all, is setting people up for a major career crash. The more effort you put into it, the harder you will fall when the fact that East Indians can match you tit for tat for pennies on your dollar, finally catches up: namely, you may have amassed a TON of college debt, only to see your job prospects vanish by the time you even graduate; 5 years later, at the most.
Given that in East India, they can learn absolutely everything that you are teaching and do it for pennies on our dollar, it will inevitably come to pass that there is no need to hire CS grads from America, and thus there'll be no point in teaching computer science in the US any more. This is a matter of when, not if.
If you're a professor, as I said, your profession may be clinging to life now and you may not even be able to see the end up ahead. I can understand thus why a CS professor might say their job is secure. But in this generation, or the next (at the latest), CS professors in America won't be any more necessary than teachers of horse cart production.
That having been said, it is wise not to even get into CS (as you well know, CS enrollment is dropping). It's wise to get into a field where you'll learn how to rent-a-coder.
Namely, the job of the future will involve management - as in, learning how to outsource, not how to program. There aren't too many management jobs to go around, though, and they too will be outsourced, and East Indian companies will do to America's tech companies what Japan is doing to the Big Three automakers now: they will undercut you by price first, then quality second, after which they'll own all your market share, and finally leave you with a billion dollars of losses a year until you finally leave the software business completely.
Of course, I am inviting a major chicken little vs the ostrich debate here, so I'll shut up.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Eh, I just fundamentally disagree about what college is about. I agree wholeheartedly that we shouldn't shove the idea that they should become techies down kids throats. They did that when I was in high school (I'm still working on getting into PhD programs, no worries about becoming faculty yet). The kids who go into CS because they were told to go in lead miserable careers. Who would want to do a field just because it makes money? Then, worse, in reality, often, it doesn't make money.
That said, most of my peers who just finished their M.Eng's have great jobs making money hand over fist. Not all of them are writing software, but many industries appreciate the analytical and mathematical skills. My friend who is a banker is making 6 figures, a couple buddies who headed off to MS or large labs are making high 5 figures.
Also, on the front of India, one has to realize that, at the larger scale, economic factors being what they are, that many countries can undercut us on just about any front. Your job isn't "safe," because of its industry. India could pop up any industry and undercut us (and they do), but their education system beats the tar out of ours, and their pay rates are, as you said, pennies on the dollar. It's not so much them paying back student loans, they just get paid less.
So, now you have a major cultural issue. US CEOs don't care that they are rotting out the core of their companies. See, if you don't produce a product, your company isn't worth anything. A brand name and management only go so far. A bunch of managers bumping up the price of an Indian product doesn't make their company worth a dime. It's the Indian company that is worth something. Eventually, the US economy will adjust, or the US will go bankrupt. Ok, so, then we all move to India and get jobs as coders. Who cares?
My argument is, schools should teach what they're supposed to teach. My undergraduate school taught me how to code, very well (I'm one of the best coders here, and was one of the best in industry), but fell short in some areas, while still managing to be quite strong in others.
Even all of that said, the argument has nothing to do with how CS should be taught. You can't defend "well, CS students should slack off," by saying "they have no future anyway." Jeez, do you think that History students outsource their essays, because, how much of a "History" industry is there anyway?
"Eventually you will find the illusions of differences between East Indian coders and American coders are gone and that the answer to that question is "absolutely nothing.""
Absolutely, eventually this will happen - Indians (and romanians, and chinese, and all the other places showing up on RentACoder) are just as smart. But in the meantime, it is a good question to ask, rather then just blindly hoping that if you get a CS degree you are magically protected.