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."

Comments

Exams??

[Freaky Spook]

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.

Re:Why bother?

[general_re]

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?

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.

Re:Let them do it.

[lawpoop]

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.

Re:Why bother?

[Browncoat]

Today my professor (a communications class) told us a story of a student she had who kept on plagiarizing, even after she failed his paper (the first incident), kicked him out of class (second incident), and let him back into class when the Dean of the department asked her to give him another chance. He cheated again after that, when he submitted his final projects. The idiot was supposed to write two papers, one on something he was passionate about, and the other was a book report.

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!

Ethics of cheating

[gv250]

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?

Re:Not a major concern

[TubeSteak]

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%.

Re:Why bother?

[arcsine]

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.

It's not the CS students that are cheating..

[damne33]

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.

Re:Teach your children ....

[miyako]

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.

Re:My experiences with rent-a-coder and cheating

[verbatim]

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.

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.