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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/...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?
Why in the old days we had to post the problems on USENET and hope not to get *plonked*! Kids today are sooo spoiled.
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.
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.
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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The times are gone when most people in CS are geeks.
Many, many, *many* are in it for the money, or because people keep telling them computers are the place to be. I'm in computer engineering myself, but I've had to take up through jr level comp sci courses, and in each and every one I see people who fail to exhibit basic programming knowledge, or only a middling skill level in using the computer in general.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
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?
No. It's everybody's loss. These losers devalue the degree of Computer Science. Employers are starting to realize that a lot of these dolts don't really have any clue at all, and this alters their perceptions of CS graduates in general. 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. This might lead them to believe that I am as well.
"You're only cheating yourself" might be true in high school but certainly not at the collegiate level. These sorts of people piss me off.
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.
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]
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Many, many, *many* are in it for the money, or because people keep telling them computers are the place to be. I'm in computer engineering myself, but I've had to take up through jr level comp sci courses, and in each and every one I see people who fail to exhibit basic programming knowledge, or only a middling skill level in using the computer in general.
And a lot of them are just mildly ok at math and figure you have to major in SOMETHING. I mean a lot of them wouldn't feel passionate about anything, but you have to pick a major, so why not computer science? Why does everyone here think that computer science is a field of study so noble, so exalted, that it and only it should escape the mediocre masses that muddle along in any other field? I mean, plenty of those English majors don't read books outside of school, and plenty of those engineering majors never even looked at a schematic they weren't assigned in class, and plenty of those astronomy majors don't even own telescopes. Just have to learn to deal with the mediocre people instead of urging them to go infest another field.
It's fairly clear that particular person should've majored in Business Administration, not Computer Science.
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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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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"
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.
If you aren't passionate, or competant enough to participate in any course offered at a tertiary education institution without cheating - don't go through tertiary education. Try apprenticing in a trade instead. You can get good money as a tradesman, and they don't have the same intellectual focus as a university/college degree.
If you aren't passionate or competant enough in any field offered anywhere, well, you're better served getting started on your french-frying career, because if you can't pull it together enough to get a degree or trade certificate, you're not going to be able to do it for a living.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
...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.
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.
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.
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?
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.