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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."
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.
The types of people who cheat in their CS courses are likely the types of people who'd cheat regardless of their chosen field. My wife teaches history (on the high school level, though), and there's just been an explosion of plagiarism in the last few years or so - it's just tremendously easy and tempting to CTRL-C CTRL-V some website into your paper.
Of course, what these knuckleheads don't realize is that the same developments that make it easy for them to cheat also make tremendously easy to catch cheaters - there have been course sections where literally half the class has gotten caught with a hand in the cookie jar, and it really, really makes me wonder what the fuck these kids are thinking. Forget about not learning the tools for your career - some of them are bound and determined not to learn a goddamn thing, period.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Or, you can become a consultant and bid out jobs locally, then have Indians do it for next to nothing. After four years of doing this at school, you would be pretty good at managing such projects.
I know a few consultants in my area that don't do any programming anymore. They have a team in Asia and a team in Eastern Europe working on their projects 24/7. It's not a complete retirement, because you do have to negotiate cultural barriers (such as what "I need it tomorrow" means), and you are not within ass-kicking distance of the people you are relying on.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
For the book report, he copied and pasted a bunch of movie reviews together, and submitted it. For the other paper, he wrote about the history of Quakers -- who exactly is passionate about Quakers? But beside that point, she thought it looked familiar, and she found the article in some mid 80's history magazine. It hadn't been published online anywhere, but she still caught him, because she recognized it.
Futile attempt, because he had already failed the class by then!
"Curse your sudden, but inevitable betrayal!"
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?
I had a teacher that let you decide your own groups, but with the understanding that along with the final paper/presentation/whatever, you would 'grade' your fellow group members.
You had 100 points to split up between everyone in the group and he'd add up the seperate 'grades' for each student and then multiply the final grade by that number.
So if the group paper was worth a 74% and your group 'grade' was a 94%... you'd get a 70%
It gave you the opportunity to penalize the asshats who weren't pulling their weight. And the people who did outstanding work could get a grade higher than 100%.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Only if your major is political science and the like. AFAIK, people in engineering, many sciences, computing, operations research, statistics, accounting, CIS, and the like are getting decent job offers because their years of study weren't wholly 'wasted' on subjects that do not find direct applications in the real life. Going back to the topic, a bachelors degree in Computer Science from a respectable university is still worth a lot. I had many friends who graduated with BA in CS and related subjects from a respectable state university in the US and all of them seem to have gotten excellent job offers right after graduation from -major- e-comerce and software companies.
Cheaters are everywhere, that's for sure. I was a teacher's assistant several years ago. I graded all the programs and quizes. My personal policy was to report every cheater. Generally we had them put on academic probation and removed from the class. I've caught 4-5. I only had 30 assignments to grade normally, so I had a pretty good memory of what someone did. I caught two because they had the exact same comments for their program, and upon closer inspection, had nearly the same program. The professor was a bit gunshy, and didn't have them removed from class. However, after I caught one of the students cheating with another, I at least got one removed from the class.
You have to a zero tolerance policy, otherwise students will think that they can get away with it.
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.
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.
One needs to experience programming while in class. So, this is what one of my instructors did: at the end of every major coding project, we had to meet with the professor (or assistant) and defend our project much like a thesis (although less intensive). Unfortunately, this is time consuming and can't be done for every entry-level CS course (many of my freshman/sophmore classes had 200+ students).
Of course, K-State instituted a programming test before our Senior Projects. If you don't pass it, you don't get into the class -- to many people were graduating without knowing basic programming. This was reflecting terribly on K-State.
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.
Well your policy would have got me kicked out of a class for reasons not of my own. I once had a linear algebra assignment that was graded and a name written over top of mine after it was returned to me.
I never understood why that name was written until after the semester had ended. A person with said name came up to me and thanked me for allowing him to "borrow" my assignment. Apparently he was able to fish out my submitted work from the drop box and he cribbed my work. I was quite livid but I held my tongue.
If you really want to catch cheaters and hangers on, give snap quizzes. Assigned work is rife with plagarism.
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.
There is one problem with this...
I remember once a few semesters ago in a class we were assigned to give presentations on some area of computing that we chose. I ended up giving one on Quantum Computing. I was under the impression that everything went well- until I got a letter asking me to be in one of the meeting rooms at school. I showed up and there were a couple of professors and deans and an FA. My first reaction was that my presentation was that good (yeah, I got an ego). Well they told me they had caught me cheating- and I was like "wtf?". Apparently my professor had googled around on the subject and found my website (everything on my site is under a psudoname) and found some of the stuff that I had used in my presentation that I published on my website.
The professor assumed that I had simply ripped off stuff from a site on the net.
I did eventually get it worked out- but it's worth remembering that a lot of people publish work on the web now.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I have done that before. I was bored one day, wandering around usenet, when I found a posting that was asking for an assignment to be done. It wasn't just the usual "I have to do X" but it was "here's my assignment, can anyone do it for me?" Well, I was young and brash, still in highschool and here was a university level programming assignment...
I initially just did the assignment for myself -- could I do it. When it was done, I decided to send it out to the guy with a note: "I'm only in highschoo, but this is how I might do it." What he didn't know was that I BCC'd his professor on the e-mail. A few weeks later I recieved a note from the professor thanking me for my honesty, chasting me for my dishonesty, and praising me for the quality of my solution.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
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
That is true. I took a few Grad Software Engineering Classes at UMUC.com and all of my teachers told me that one of the purposes of the degree was to train the students to become managers of outsourced Indian developers.
-Dipster
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.
1. Dude - wait till you're in the "real world." Do you think your managers will give a rat's ass about how much of an accomplishment you think getting your CS degree is? If you end up in IT - just pray you don't end up in a company that considers it to be just a chargeback service. If you end up in manufacturing or something besides telecom or perhaps the financial sector, where IT is truly mission critical, you're likely to be a little whipping boy to the "core business." You may have all kinds of ideas about how to save money and make IT work better for them, but you won't have the chance to even present them. Innovation can't be billed back to the "customer."
2. There are plenty of people out there who thought CS was easy. It's because they didn't complete a real CS program. Devry, ITT, (insert your tech program here) are great for churning out people with knowledge of the latest and greatest technologies, but they aren't so great about teaching the theory and background knowledge that you're getting. Unfortunately, many people don't know the difference.
I realize there's been some CS bashing in this thread and you're probably feeling defensive, but I'm offended by your characterization of the humanities. There are more than a few CS majors that couldn't write an analytical paper to save their life. There is skill in reading a book critically, researching a subject thoroughly, coming up with your own unique perspective on the subject, and writing a 10 (or 25, or 50) page paper that puts forth your perspective in a way that is logical, understandable, and complete. And there are many jobs out there that value good writing skills more than they value whether you know C# or not, because if you're a good writer and researcher, it almost doesn't matter what the subject is.
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.
i hate this "real world" crap.
i've been responsible for hiring rounds in several different organizations, looking for IT support, engineers for web-based financial systems, embedded OS developers, and the like. in absolutely every case, seeing a PDP-11 on someone's resumé would've been a big win for that candidate.
when i need to hire a developer for a perl-based system, i don't look for just perl or, really, care how many dozen perl projects they've worked on. i want to see something that tells me this person has a broader understanding of engineering, not just coding. perl monkeys are a dime a dozen. really, really good ones are two for a buck fifty. depending on the project, i might need a perl monkey or two; sometimes we need to generate a lot of functional code quickly, and quality and other future-looking concerns take a back seat. but generally, i want engineers.
the last project i hired for was a perl front end to a C/C++ database with awk, perl, sh, and rc glue connecting various bits together (the project's still ongoing). the most insightful member of staff, at least in certain areas, was the one who was most vocal about hating perl and had the least experience with it. he loves python and is trying to get into ruby. he's worked on PDP-11s and VAXes. his broader understanding of engineering helped us recognize problems in the existing design and, even though the system continued to be perl based, we were able to dramatically improve it based on his concrete suggestions. that experience was not an exception, in my experience. i wouldn't have traded him for any number of more vanilla grads.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
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.
Where did you go to school?
I did CS (in the engineering department) at a top-20 piravte school, and it was an extremely challenging program. The algorithms and compiler classes were more theoretically difficult than even 300-level physics classes I took.
After my senior year I still owed three core CS classes, on account of my double major. The problem was, my school didn't offer those needed courses until the next spring. So they let me take one semester of classes for in-major credit in the fall at a large state school a few states away.
I took classes that were supposed to be 400-level CS courses, but they were a total joke. I literally blew out the curve on every test I took, and achieved straight-As. Perhaps it was the relative quality of students compared with my alma mater, but this was supposed to be one of the "better" Big Ten schools, academically. But it was a total joke from my perspective.