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IT Students Contract Out Coursework To India
An anonymous reader writes "Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect." The irony, of course, is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway.
... this is what you get in a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty.
I have always written programs because it is fun and rewarding. That was true in middle school, true in high school, true in college, and true now (I'm close to 40). When it's not fun I'll stop doing it. How is paying someone else to write your programs fun? How is it rewarding? It's not; it is just pathetic.
This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.
Mind you, this is also a good argument for forcing students to show their intermediate work (design, etc) and to do said intermediate work with pen and paper. It's a lot harder to outsource something that would be in the wrong handwriting and have to be Fedex'd from India.
ERROR: Null
If the coursework / dissertation seems out of line with the student's "normal" performance .. hey, take five minutes (with the work in front of you, not in front of him), and ask him a few questions about it.
How long will it take to determine he doesn't know squat about what he turned in, eh?
Well, they might as well start early and get into the practice of out-sourcing.
"£100 for postgraduate dissertations."
Seriously!? If those dissertations are any good, we might as well go directly to the source and hire those guys to do R & D for us.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I recently read one of Feynnman's books and as odd a character he is, I think he hit the nail on the head when talking about how teachers today simply dish out information and the students memorize. This has lent to a society where students know they are going to forget the courseload in a month so why not have someone else do the work for you. College is all about the piece of paper now adays anyway so you can get a higher paying job. At least that is the way the universities seem to present themselves in their advertisements.
You want to keep students from outsourcing? Push them harder, teach rather than have them memorize, administratively, get more teachers. Universities should be hard, people should drop out, if you are not passionate about the subject then head to Vo-Tech. I want universities to go back to learning institutions rather than the factories they have become.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
At my place is common practice to have code review and sharing of the design decision with each team member. What would those student to, phone back to india to ask for clarification?
(C) Copyright Alexander Gromikov in the code is a big hint, if the students name is Ken Smith.
See it in action! http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Agetafreelancer.com+%22homework%22&btnG=Google+Search
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
That will work until the have to sit down for an actual test or later when they try to hold a job. Might get the cheaters through a class but it's hard to hide a lack of training in the real world. I'm always astonished at the effort people put in to avoid work.
Of course I would blame the professors too for designing a course where such cheating is practically possible. There are definitely ways to make this sort of cheating much harder. In class tests and in class assignments are among the more obvious methods.
My karma's gone way up ever since I started outsourcing my comments.
How can this be impossible to detect? I remember that when I submitted my MA dissertation (a 50,000 word piece about Roman military history), I had a three hour viva on it, where two senior members of the faculty and an external examiner asked me a huge range of questions about not only the subject matter itself, but the processes I'd gone through in researching and writing my dissertation. I know for sure that if I hadn't written the thing myself, there was no way I could have made it through that. Even my significantly more modest undergraduate dissertation (a snip at just 10,000 words) was subject to a 45 minute viva, before a similar panel. Again, if I'd paid somebody else to write it, I'd have stumbled within the first five minutes.
It seems here that "impossible to detect" actually means "impossible to detect without using tried and tested methods that are just too tiresome and/or expensive to use". Admittedly, viva scrutiny isn't possible for every single assignment, but I really would hope that any institution worth its salt would be subjecting final year dissertations to this level of probing. Maybe this doesn't apply in IT courses? I'd find that very surprising, but maybe somebody else with more relevant experience could shed some light.
It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect.
Maybe those lecturers should assign coursework that can't be done by a rent-a-coder in India.
To put it differently, if you're going to a university where the assignments can be outsourced to India for $10, you aren't learning the material you need in order to be globally competitive. Your best bet is to just leave.
At my university (I mentioned it in a previous Slashdot post), most module projects have to include a presentation describing the work, with time for questions.
It's cruel, but I think it's quite funny when folks can't readily describe what they did*. It gets quite Phoenix Wright-y at times.
* It's not funny when you're nervous and can't think of a way to articulate how you designed a complex system, but it's usually easy to tell the difference.
I have pride in my intellectual prowess. Its inconceivable I'd cheat this way. I have to show off to the teacher how smart I am.
This is called as contract cheating. "Clients" use freelancing websites (like elance.com etc.) to put up work (in this case assignments, mini projects etc.) which are then given to the lowest bidder. A lot of small to medium companies in India work on such projects.
I interviewed a couple of grads and one said he'd outsource the work to India. I hired him on the spot because that's the correct answer! Because, I can't find any excellent IT folks here so I have to go overseas.
Why yes! I recruit for IBM, Intel, Bank of America, and many many other large corporations.
Anyone in the IT field that has dealt with outsourced code knows that it's generally buggy and poorly written and requires a lot of debug time on the company side. It's not likely that annoying college students are going to get good quality especially since they likely won't know the difference if they are using a service like that anyway.
I guess outsourcing would generally work for simple assignments, but frankly it would take more time to find someone to do it then it would to do most coding assignments in the first place. Add to that the fact that you will have tests on the subject both in class and in interviews so doing this is not a good move long term anyway.
Now if it was English papers...
If you wanted to be REALLY nasty, you'd then match up marks on the exam with marks on course work and use that as the basis to take a close look at the cases where there was a large discrepancy.
And then, of course, I nice, public Academic Misconduct hearing.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Simply setup operations in these countries to accept work from potential students. Once submitted follow the reverse path to the culprit, then punish the dude and dismiss him, then publicize it. Sounds simple to me.
Are you suggesting my upcoming dissertation about the Kwik-E Mart might be read suspiciously?
Thank you for ruining my idea! Please come again.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
After all, if they think that all they need is the degree certificate in order to get a decent career in IT, then their stupidity leaves the field clear for those of us who slaved over a hot dissertation for months on end.
I have met such morons before, usually they end up in the lowest wage positions, or drifting from one shit job to the next.
When I was an undergrad in CS four years back, there were girls on my course offering sex in return for completing their programming assignments. I never took one of them up on this offer. To this day I have no idea why....
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Yeah, I know this doesn't fit the traditional view of how schoolwork gets done, but I've heard a rumor that sometimes things change. It's not that much of a change anyway: people have been getting other people to do their homework for as long as there have been schools. Technology has just provided ways to make it more efficient.
If this is really growing as fast as they suggest then maybe the educators need to look at why so many students don't see any value in doing the work themselves. My daughter is majoring in a field that she loves, but she's absolutely hating school since she realized that at least 80% of her coursework is geared toward creating more academicians.
On the other hand, with the outsourcing the student gets experience in a valuable business skill instead of spending a bunch of time doing something he'll never have use for after college.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
....was actually outsourced to an India Contractor.
(Unfortunately so is the moderation on the comments)
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I used to do work on Rent A Coder, till I couldn't compete anymore. 5 years ago, you could get good money for writing simple projects for people (I didn't ask what the projects were for ;) ... now programmers abroad are doing the same coding for about 10 times less cost (my non-scientific observations on my project bids) than I can. This thing has been around a long time.
Outsourcing in general is caused by the minimum wage. Companies are able to get cheaper labor outside the country, and we end up paying more through transport costs than we would if there was no minimum wage.
Simply put, when I'm in a position to hire myself - in the next few years - I'll simply not hire any person who graduated after 2005 unless they've actually got real world experience under their belt and even then they'll have to get technical describing their work, what they did, etc. That, or they went to a top-notch university that I can trust to have avoided such behaviour.
So basically, it will screw all students including the honest ones.
Note that increasing costs in India, etc, mean that outsourcing will get less desirable over time. Of course, if the home-grown talent cheated their way to a degree (and mark my words that each time you hire a graduate and they're rubbish and know nothing, that university will be discarded on future applications) then outsourcing might be the only way to go, even if it's not any cheaper.
Simply stated, coursework in CS must become more writing intensive (if it currently is not..your mileage may vary at your institution). Students must be forced to explain their thinking, verbalize their understanding, and convey the concepts to the instructor and other students. The day when curricula asks students to 'do', 'mimic', or 'repeat' rather than to 'know' and 'understand' is the day curricula undermines itself. Unfortunately, this day has already come for many academic institutions around the United States.
Note: I'm not saying all academic institutions in the US (or anywhere else for that matter) are ruined or busted. There are stellar schools that are still keeping on keepin' on.
And in other breaking news students have started paying other students to write PAPERS for them!!!
Seriously, for as long as I can remember students have been using "paper writing services." Yes, this predates the internet. I'm sure many slashdot readers have been paid to do someones work for them. And yes, this predates the internet.
Just wait until they get interviewed for a position where they can't do this. Pretty soon, they'll either have to learn to do it themselves or get fired.
Oh, and if they do continue this sort of thing without the company's approval, there are all sorts of wonderful civil actions that can be taken against them by their employer. Like... exposing trade secrets to unauthorized personnel, distributing company intellectual property to those without authorization...
God help them if they go to work as an engineer for a government contractor. They'll have the Inspector General or the FBI busting down their door with an arrest warrant if they're not very, very careful.
I've been in IT for 27 years, having started out by learning Keypunching via the Military. Branched out to PC's in 1982, taught myself whatever was needed to perform the various jobs I've held over the years. Now I find myself working as a Software QA lead...and interviewing folks who are out of college who have no idea how to configure an XP system to set up two different printers on a network. And these fools have Bachelor Degrees?
So, having a degree is worth what? It doesn't appear its worth the paper its printed on. These same folks outsourcing their coursework are the next generation of Enron II...no ethics, no sense of pride in a job well done as they havn't even done it.
Nice to see the Secondary skills I've maintained in the Construction and Plumbing trades will still be needed...these fools will probably be the ones trying to cut a sheet of plywood using their leg as a saw-horse...assuming they can figure out how to USE the saw.
At least the good news is they'll have a good rapport with the Tech support folks, having dealt with so many of them during college.
"Work is the curse of the drinking class" Oscar Wilde
Q: Who won American Idol last year?
A: I don't know
Shit, that either means he's Indian or an American with taste.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
When I was a grad student, I was loaded with coursework, regular dept work for an asst'ship I had, an off-campus job, and more... I didn't have time to sit down and write a macro-assembler in C for an assignment.
I'd written parsers, and the like before, and this wasn't going to be a problem, I just didn't have the time.
So I found a buddy - had him code it for me for some bucks... Turned it in, the teacher checked off the assignment, all was well...
What'd I learn from that experience? Delegate to get things done...
Fast forward some years - I now also have an MBA and as a manager I need to delegate to get things done - there's not enough time in the day to handle it all. I needed a project completed, my teams were loaded - so I looked up my old pal - he needed a project, volia! Work's getting done...
What professors fail to understand is that so much of what they're asking to be done is absolute rote crap that it's BORING... Also, it takes time, and that's not the only class/duty the student has - sometimes it's just impossible to get it all done...
As for the dissertation - is it a PhD dissertation or some bullshit senior thesis? The way I understood things, the PhD dissertation was under the direction of a supporting prof and committee and one had to run just about everything past them, then compile the stats, then write the paper, then defend it in front of the committee... I'd find it hard to believe that an India-outsourced paper would pass muster...
Some bullshit Senior Thesis on the Natural Harmonic Resonance of a Hostess Fruitpie might though (c.f.: I did write that for a class paper... made the whole thing up - turned it in. Prof read it, said "read it in front of the class and I'll give you an A")
Transfer them to the business school. Where they'll probably get extra credit for their managerial skills.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Funny, child labor laws, weekends, 40 hour work weeks, worker safety laws, and clean air/clean water laws do the same thing. These things all drive up the cost of labor and push down productivity.
Maybe for the US to remain competitive, we should repeal those laws that prevent Americans from being truly competitive in the global economy. If it takes our kids working in coal mines 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, so be it. The first goal of American government is to protect the profitability of domestic and foreign businesses, and all these laws are standing in the way of this. /sarcasm off
Education focuses too much on competition and not enough on cooperation
Students get in Honor Code trouble all the time because they work to closely together..
OK, but seriously.. this is a bit far.
I'm now in Poland: http://williamwnek
These students will fit right into today's IT world. Lack of ethics, integrity, technical skills, etc... Heck, make 'em managers right out of school. They're obviously qualified.
The point of coursework is to teach or reinforce material. If the student gets someone else to do the work for them, the point of the work is lost.
When I went to college, I paid thousands of dollars a year to go to a university where I earn an excellent education. Why would I want to squander that opportunity by paying someone else to do my work?
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
When I first started coding (early 80s) it was on a mainframe which could only be accessed via the computer lab. Everyone closely guarded their user accounts, but when we compiled our programs, it generated a listing on a central printer. You would submit your program for compilation, then go hang out at the printer waiting for it to appear. Typically, a student would glance at the listing, note the compilation error, then toss the listing in the trash.
It wasn't long before the more clueless, or lazier students figured out that they could get pretty far ahead in their projects by rifling through the trash bin and pulling out another student's listing which (mostly) worked.
Those of us actually doing the work had no clue that this was going on because it was not unusual for someone to be digging through the trash bin for one of their own previous listings.
I learned about this "dumpster diving" practice when one of my professors warned me that another student had copied my work almost verbatim. Fortunately this prof knew me and my "style" well enough to figure out what was going on. After that, I saved all my listings and only trashed them later off site.
My point is that cheating like this among student coders is nothing new. There are always a few who are unable to make it on their own merits.
Proverbs 21:19
these sound less like IT professionals and more like business managers and political "scientists".
Nope, sorry, it's not impossible to detect.
Most of our new IT folks with their shiny new degrees get a nice entry level position into the internal IT helpdesk, level 1 support.
Installing Windows, Rebooting Computers, Installing service packs, lugging desktops, and pulling cable.
If they can cut the mustard there, they get cross trained with the web folks, doing php/sql and some code.
If they can still cut it there, they can go into development as a junior coder.
It takes time and patience, something they should have learned by themselves at university. If they don't stick with it, I don't want them.
They are not being lenient, they are acting out of fear of lawsuits and funding cuts.
Lenient is the PC way of saying we're letting unqualified people in because they meet one quota or another. Lenient is PC for saying passing over better qualified students because they don't come with bonus money : read government funds.
One thing that does amaze me is some of the larger "private" schools who are sitting on billions all the while bemoaning the fact that the government doesn't do enough to pay for quota groups to attend. BILLIONS. Their interest alone would pay for many thousands to have access to their schools but they prefer to sit on it.
Sorry, the courts and congress have already decided that merit is not a valid measurement, especially if declaring one side having more offends another.
The one great truth too many people want to ignore is that we are not all created equal. The law can state otherwise, "feel gooders" can cry all they want, the PC police can declare the sentence "hate speech" but fortunately nature doesn't care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Coursework and diploma dissertations should be a work of creativity. And one takes pride on what he/she creates. I can't imagine a stranger doing a better job at anything I am supposed to do, than myself. Even if I am not a good coder (I am not), I'll take the time it takes and do things right.
Besides, how can these not be detected? If Matthew Proofrock would hand in coursework with horrible English grammar and style, you'd probably raise an eyebrow and start asking questions.
As for outsourcing final dissertations: if students are able to pull THAT off, the commission/panel is not asking real questions, but just being patronizing - "We don't want to embarrass our student on this day, now do we...".
I am actually studying in a non-IT field (material science, micro/nanotech, electronics), and our homeworks all require a lot of creativity. Students that just follow the dotted line and don't give anything from themselves, have little chance of having their work accepted. I don't know if that's the case everywhere, but it is here in Helsinki.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I find your ideas intriuging and wish to subscribe to your revolution
A long ago class mate started a company in Canada to do just this. He even asked if cared to do freelance work doing assignments to help keep up with the demand. His rates where not cheap and he offered good coin to do the work. I never took the work as I felt it would be unethical.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
when they end up working with their graduate degree, what they will be doing is practically going to be THIS anyway ? working in a global corporation, trying to synchronize budgets, datelines, goals with teams scattered around the world ?
if they can pull it off, thats fine in my book. i doubt what technology they are being made to study with those assignments are going to be there when they are working their 5th year in the field, but people and project management skills, do stay forever.
Read radical news here
The follow up article, which hasn't been published yet, is the effect that outsourcing dissertation evaluations has had on the educational process.
The most shocking revelation will be that these outsourced professors frequently evaluate their own papers, effectively double-dipping.
The professors are pathetic. OOO we can't stop cheating OOO guess we will just keep turning out dunces....
Why not randomly select some papers and ask some questions? If you really wrote it you can easily explain 90%+.
I am sure there is a LOT of other methods if the instructor actually put some thought and effort into doing their job.
So in essence we have slackers complaining that slackers are bypassing the training. Personally it sounds like the instructor is getting across how they work quite well, how ironic.
This has been going on for years. I had one group of students post my final project on RentaCoder.com about 5 years ago. Fortunately, the assignment was of great enough complexity that no-one was willing to bid on it. As a result of this incident I learned how out of touch some senior adminstrators at my college were with current reality. The incident reached the highest levels and the response was "how is this different than students passing cheat-sheets". One difference of course is that it might be a Russian or Indian Ph.D passing the cheat sheet and it can't be caught. They couldn't comprehend this.
There are some protective measures that can be taken. Using test questions that exercise what is learned in assignments (perhaps by including questions that are stripped down analogs of assignments or projects)and by requiring that students must have a passing grade in the test component to pass the course helps a little bit. I had one student once hand me an assignment that I don't believe could have been written by even a gifted student. It had the signature of several years of professional practice. Her cousin was a senior programmer on Wall Street. She failed the course because of the test component (which included a grossly simplified version of the project).
Unfortunately, I believe this is the new reality and extra effort is required to deal with it.
"It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect."
Perhaps lecturers should stop outsourcing to India preparing assignments... ?
I actually studied in college, and enjoyed doing so. Well most of it, anyway.
Apply yourself - you'd be amazed at what you are capable of.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
A bit off-topic, I know, but where can I get this service? (not for student assignments) I'd like to talk with someone individually, rather than going through a placement company. Cut out the middleman, so to speak. Google does not seem able to answer this question.
And yet, most large corporations require a 4-year degree (or more) just to get into the interview process for a job, regardless of one's real-world experience. We can see from this how much a lot of those 4-year degrees are really worth.
I attended a course on Scrum by Craig Larman recently, where brought utterly convincing arguments for what he called the Toyota Way, which, amongst others, requires that managers are excellent workers, not just administrators. If you want to tell people to do something, and if you want to judge their work, you need to know just as much about their work as they do.
That's one of the reasons why Toyota became the most successful car manufacturer in the world, and surely SW people can learn a lot from them.
My company is actually far from it. Our managers can't really make informed decisions, and this just so sucks.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
I can understand how students can get code written by someone from India. But dissertations, Are these dissertations made to professors from "University of Phoenix". If out sourced work can generate dissertations, how come the people who write these dissertations for £5, do not publish their own work. If professors cannot differentiate between dissertations that undermines their credibility. If you are outsourcing the code that you need to write that means the person is just lazy, how much time does it take to type something into google, and find your answer, thousands of Indians that provide code do it exactly that way.
Yes, but keep in mind this would be a war of 1st world scrawny nerds against 3rd world scrawny nerds. I expect the violent overthrow would look something like the Star Wars kid on a massive scale. There would be broken glasses and dropped inhalers everywhere.
interviewers these days. You are hiring someone with master's degree and asking them concrete questions in a single programming language?
Why don't you instead try to gauge how good the person is at solving problems, how fast do they learn and find their way around in a strange situation etc. After all their degree was supposed to teach them is how to learn fast, research and to develop mental skills and world view.
It should only be a matter of weeks or months to master any programming language for people like that.
So what if someone with a PhD in nuclear physics or pure math does not know C, or technology X, or the architecture of your business software. They will learn it faster than anyone else, and that is the point.
If you wanted brainless coder (if there is such a thing at all) you should not have interviewed anyone with a post graduate degree.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
www.blueapples.org
Are we really that surprised? We've had this in the humanities and social sciences for years. Go to any university in the developing world. Students pay people to write all their papers and exams. I heard a story recently about a political science PhD candidate at Western Michigan University who was discovered to have plagiarized everything that he had ever written.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
He checks the project-for-hire boards for assignments he hands out, and bids to do the homework for the student. The sweet part is that he has hard proof of cheating, and get PAID by the looser he's about to throw out of his class.
Outsource the trivial course work and spend your time doing more interesting stuff like for example contributing to open source projects.
I think we can agree on one thing however: The reduction of an applicant to a statistic is detrimental to the creativeness of the student body. Many brilliant minds are surely passed over because the admissions office did not (or could not) take the time to look deeper.
There's some sort of "balance" you have to strike when it comes to adjusting minimum wage.
If you let it get too low, everyone else in the country gets a "pay cut", in the form of paying for more welfare programs and tax cheating.
(You might be surprised how many low-income families just manage to survive, using a combination of 2 people earning near min. wage pay, claiming childcare tax deductions of people who aren't really their own kids, and collecting all the welfare benefits possible to claim.)
And the idle rich and poor would come together, in the spirit of harmony, to laugh and mock.
I will be a benifit to your companies bottom line, I know how to keep costs down by out sourcing work and I have the experience to back it up.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
the last few decades of computer science education in US/European universities gave the world..
Unix, DOS, Linux, PCs, mainframes, supercomputers, C, C++, Fortran, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby..
Last few years of IT in india (is it? I do not think it is Indian CS graduates doing all this - they, along with the rest of the brainy folks out there, are busy working for multinationals) gave the world..
a few folks who will teach the rest of the world how to cheat, cheap.
India, you have had 50 years of corruption. There are a lot of developed countries in the world that you can elarn a lot from, and improve your lot quite a bit. Why dont you learn how to develop your country infrastructure, and create/invent some products, software, medicines etc on your OWN instead of simply compying eveyrthing and also teaching the rest of the world your corrupt ways?
How many of your software companies actually develop a product? Do not count the ones where ideas come from US/Europe multi nationals.
How many of your pharma compnies actually develop a medicine instead of stealing something and filing patent lawsuits?
How many of your IT grads resumes are actually true? I am not talking padding, but blatant lies involving false jobs, assignments etc.
How many of your infrastructure projects see completion without 70% of the funds ending up in some private bank account?
The developed world is not without faults, but they surely have done some things right to get where they are. Why dont you guys just learn something good from the developed world instead of teaching them your corrupt ways?
when this happens. If many students graduate from a program and have no clue about the subject matter, it begins to devalue the degree for the hard working students. I can recall many times students attempting to cheat in my Software Engineering undergraduate program at U of M - Dearborn. Some of the professors actually devised some pretty interesting ways of catching students who were cheating.
I'll never forget one instance though. It was the final class of my Software Engineering II class and we had to present our final projects. One of the students was nervously typing away to finish making his presentation when he asked me what a labyrinth was to which I replied a maze. It was very obvious at that point that the student had ripped his project offline some how. The humorous part was when he began to describe his technology during the presentation where it was apparent he did not know the difference between Java and JavaScript. He talked about needing the JVM to run the JavaScript that it was written in. The teacher began to prod at him more about this since the student obviously did not know what he was talking about. The student began to get really nervous and also couldn't explain the inner workings of the software either. I don't know what happened with that, but I do know that I felt relieved that someone actually got caught cheating and embarrassed for it.
From the article header : "It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect."
I would have though such activity would be extremely easy to detect, especially by a course instructor. Simply prepare a very comprehensive, challenging final exam based on the semester's coursework, then GIVE that exam at the end of the semester.
Those students that fail are prime candidates for having outsourced their coursework during the semester. Those that pass the exam very likely put in the hours and did the work.
Elementary, my dear Watson.
You know... those little paper thingies with numbers and pictures of people on them, that you give at the store and they let you take things out of the store?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The irony of course is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway.
This is not how they will work. This is how their would-be boss will work. Their would-be boss will farm the work out to India and they themselves will be without a job.
It would be awesome if the industry worked the way the summary states. That is, that I, as a programmer could take a portion of my salary and pay some Indians to do my job while I sit at home and drink Margaritas, but management is clever enough to see this happening and determines that they can just pay the Indians directly and not employ you at all, and then THEY can sit at home and drink margaritas while you mow their lawn.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Or that they are incapable of copying the notes by hand?
Oh... and since we are practicing the "practical interview" - why hire college graduates at all? We ARE assuming that their diploma is useless, right?
Just get a bunch of kids fresh out of highschool instead.
Or... wait a second... I have a brilliant idea coming up here...
How about giving the jobs to those kids in India?
They can walk the walk, let them talk the talk too.
They will obviously pass the "practical interview", right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Home-grown talent that cheated their way into jobs either A) gets frustrated by their poor performance reviews and inability to succeed in their chosen field, and gets out, or B) actually learns to be competent over time (at the expense of whoever the sucker was who employed them first).
I saw a lot of both A and B over the years, even with a few buddies of mine.
EG. I once knew a guy who was pretty much your stereotypical "happy, go lucky, wanna-be beach bum" type. He got into I.T. as an entry-level coder using relatively high-level programming tools like "Powerbuilder". All he really did was minor code maintenance (such as, "Please change things so the clock time is displayed here, instead of here, on our screens"). He wound up scoring a support job at Oracle, earning at least 3x his former pay, with no real Oracle experience, all because he crash-course studied the thing for like 2 weeks after finding out he had an interview scheduled. Only REAL reason he wanted that job? He got to re-locate to Colorado, where he wanted to ski really badly. But his friendly personality and willingness to "cram" to know "just enough" to get by in a given situation got him through.....
1)Complete your own programming assignment
2)Purchase outsourced assignment
3)Approach girl 'A'
4)Have sex
5)Give girl 'A' outsourced assignment
6)Approach girl 'B'
7)Have sex
8)Give girl 'B' same outsourced assignment
9)Repeat
That's got PROFIT!!! written all over it.
Better yet, when they get caught handing in the same assignment and point the finger at you, you can just say, "I didn't write that. Look, the style is completely different!"
We had a senior design course teacher for EE at NCSU named Dr. Sutton (Satan). After receiving peer evaluations from 4 people stating one person did absolutely nothing for the project, he sat her down in front of the group and gave her basic concept questions from second year. When she could not answer them, or even show the equation for a simple voltage division, he told her she would never graduate until she could prove competency in person.
Team Xerox only works until you have to put up or shut up...
She shut up.
Oh well, she was gorgeous, so she is probably a manager at a Fortune 500 by now.
Things like this always make me think of the leechers of Atlas Shrugged... and how they infect every area of society.
That book killed my ability to forgive the stupid and the lazy who gave forth no effort to improve.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Less graduates per year, but boy will they be smart?
Only trouble is... By the time they finish with college their jobs will be taken by those guys from India.
Or by guys not as smart, but smart enough to do the job.
"Harder criteria" just means that you will create a bottleneck at certain points - not create better graduates.
If anything... it will just mean that in a year or two you will gather couple of hundred more students at those bottlenecks and you will either have no control over them and they will cheat their way through the test or you will have to lower the bar even more just so you could get some breathing room.
If by "raising standards" you mean more and better teachers "per capita" - by increasing the number of teachers, not decreasing the number of students - you might be on to something.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This is where the free market will shake out the losers. We had a guy at my company who spent nearly two years here and probably only wrote 100 lines of code. If my boss weren't such a nice guy he would have been gone in two weeks. The point is, in the free market if you can't perform you don't get paid. The sad part of this is these kids are screwing themselves both out of an education and a future revenue stream.
Ah, reading this article and the comments brings back memories of my grad school days as a CS major. Most of the professors could give a damn if the code we wrote was our own. However, there were a few professors that checked... with hilarious results.
Prof: "Okay, and why did you do that?"
Student #1: "Umm... well, we..."
Prof: "You made the same mistake last year's students made... even after I told you multiple times over the last three weeks to watch out for it!"
My code may have been crap, but I could at least explain why I did every line of code and every bad decision. It was crap, but it was my crap.
It will all be CG violence in WoW or StarCraft2 or whatever will be the war-game of choice at the time.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"The irony of course is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway."
The irony of course is that after their graduation, they will see that their work already is outsourced!
because when they actually doing work related to their degrees they will not know the material and thusly will get fired. Its better to do the work yourself then pay someone else to do it.
I don't know how many professors I've had too occupied with their own research or simply too inept to teach the subjects they're paid to teach.
The problem with the Education is the degree of snottyness applied to it. Having a degree shouldn't be a requirement for any job however it would show that you have formally covered the topics.
We should go to school as a way to formally learn about a topic. Not as a prereq for a job or get a higher degree just so you can teach at that level. Learning the information in a formal way would help getting a job but... It shouldn't be the deal or no deal for any job.
But the education system has been geared up that Education = Higher Class.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When caught, kick them out of Comp Sci and let them enroll in Business or Political Science I had a coworker one place I worked, that would take her programming assignments around the floor and find someone not to loaded down to "mentor" her in how to perform the task. We didn't catch on until later when we started comparing notes and realized that she was basically outsourcing her job to her coworkers for free. She was, of course, promoted to a management position.
And who says US students aren't learning valuable "real-world" skills in the classroom!?
You know smart people cheat too. And it's really impossible to catch a really smart cheater. Why? Well, most of these posts assumes the cheater just paid someone $5 to solve the problem and not have a clue about how to do it themselves. Where this really is impossible to detect is those that do understand the assignment and could do it in 8 hours or so, but has decided it's better for their life to pay someone else $5 to do most of it. I say most of it because say that Indian guy just did 7-10 hours of coding and actually did solve most of your poorly worded spec. Well, you being the smart cheater, spend maybe 10-20 minutes going through it inside and out commenting and knowing exactly what was done. $5 for 7 hours of prep work so you only have to spend 30 minutes to an hour actually learning improving it.
I find all these complaints of folks outsourcing their Phd stuff to India truly funny. Why? How about you getting 10-20 actual Indian professors to write that many papers whose only real purpose is for you to use as source material in your end product? O.k. It wouldn't be quite that bad, but you'd basically be paying for them to publish something to be peer reviewed that you can use as a source. That's exactly how Phds work anyway... You could even say you just sponsored 10-20 Indian or Chinese grants... The trick would be timing so that their work would show up published a semester or two before you really needed it. The thing is that some one that smart certainly could spend the months required to hash out everything by themselves, but it could be much easier if you actually got experienced PHds to do most of the setup for you... Then you can look really impressive for quoting foreign Phds in obscure journals and know your subject.
I read a post some one watching student presentations. Do you really want to know the one's that end up with the highest paid jobs? It's those that spend the absolute min time on tech and BS just right to the given audience. Professors are human and they reward good showmanship if it actually does fullfil their given requirements. Note you've got 10-15 group projects to watch and grade. All of the full the requirements to most extent. It's the showman ship that really sets one of from the other.
I taught "Advance Application Development and Design" at Senior level at a major State University.
We had 13 weeks, twice a week and a few holidays.
So I got to see the student who did not skip class 24 times.
In that time I gave 10 Quizzes, 2 Tests and 5 Projects to a usual 35 students.
Quizzes and Tests were pretty easy to make, grade and prevent cheating.
Projects are another thing altogether. Each student project takes about an hour to find, run, test, grade and provide feed back on. Each project can be turned in multiple time by students. When all the hours are calculated, I was making about $2/hr.
Now you want me to see you separately? Sure, all you need to do is ask. No one EVER asked. I would even cruise the labs looking for my students so I could help. Only a few times was this fruitful.
Because of rampant cheating, I started giving different, but similar projects to the students. A lot more student struggled, and more assignments were late, a few more failed, and my grading time was greatly increased.
I got tired of students who feel entitled to a passing grade if they take a class, and who feel entitled to a good grade if the attend more than half of them, so I quit.
When I was a student, I had a full time job and paid for school myself. Other student were joyous when an instructor canceled class. I, of course, was angry for not getting my money's worth.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
But I say this because I know a TON of people just like me, who either dropped out of college, or just barely passed, but are some of the best and brightest in their fields. Memorization means jack in the real world, I document like hell because I don't remember and don't need to. However it is the easiest thing to grade in school so that is what they measure you on.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Ok, so im not really a developer, but I have been looking for some company to code a MUD in C for me, with a GUI builder included. Perhaps someone could enlighten me and explain to me just how I should go about outsourcing such a project ? As mentioned, Im not a developer myself so Im primarily interested in the actual usage of the finished application. Where to turn to and the estimated costs of such an endeavorement would be of additonal help
Most rich kids applying to university in the US were already paying university professors to write their essays for years. It has just been democratized.
I went to a small school. The University of Idaho. 100% no bs... nobody cheated here from 2003-2007. You would have been caught. Maybe some incoming freshman would cheat. However, they would usually drop out of cs and pick a different major or they would be thrown out. After freshman year everyone was serious and by serious I mean serious nerds... I think I graduated with maybe ten cs majors max.
http://bellspace.net/
What, not even if they're a psychopath, and what they want to do with their lives is kill people?
Or, less extreme - what if they're a truck driver. They want to work an 80 hour week. Fine? Or do you think the chances of them falling asleep at the wheel and plowing through traffic is too high to be acceptable to the general public?
When I attended university, I regularly skipped classes if I thought I would not learn anything in that class. I could then use that time more productively.
A friend and I buddied up taking notes: he took course A and I took course B. We still did the tests (one mid-term test per course) and both got good grades in both courses. I hardly learned anything from those courses but they were prerequisites so I had to take them.
I think what I did was right because all I skipped was the drudge stuff of attending class.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
These kids shouldn't be kicked out of school or even reprimanded, they should just be awarded an MBA upon graduation instead of a computer science degree.
does anyone know where these kids are subcontracting work to? (i.e. which websites?)
I think a fair portion of the blame for the problem should fall to the institution involved, both for the lack of proper examination and for creating/supporting a culture where it is acceptable.
:P
Examination
I have been through a number of subjects at undergrad and masters level in CS where the marking encourages unfair behaviour. This includes:
- group assignments where you lose marks if anyone doesn't do an equal part (even if they are incompetent, don't speak English, don't turn up, etc.)
- group work where you all have the same mark no matter what
- peer assessment where you can "fail" for doing something half the class can't understand.
Then there is also marking systems that make no attempt to detect cheating,even simple things like two students submitting very similar work.
Culture
I have been at universities where the expectation is to pass as long as you do the barest minimum. Where someone who copies and pastes text off the internet into a report is allowed a week to "correctly cite your sources" before their mark is worked out. Subjects where the official marks is 0-100, but the real marks range from 45-85 with 45 being "didn't turn up or do anything" and 85 being "the top of the class without a single minor spelling mistake.
Another cultural problem is in managing the expectations of the students. I have been in groups where the students all want to achieve excellent results... and groups where they just want a piece of paper at the end. Worst of all is the university where they accept large numbers of internation students at exhorbitant rates to gain funding. Naturally if an international student fails a course they appeal and are almost always granted some kind of special consideration and minimal passing mark. It has reached the point where some members of staff don't bother failing students any more because they know that the uni won't back them up anyway.
Skepticism
That said, I am skeptical that any university really can't tell in the case of a dissertation. My experiences with honours/masters level (ask me next year for PhD experiences) has been that you need to know your work in great detail not to be caught out by the interviewing panel and/or markers. And that assumes you aren't (un)lucky enough to have panel members who don't have some political agenda/issue with your work.
Ultimately I strongly doubt any compatent professor could have a student work under them for 1 to 4+ years and not notice if they submitted work they didn't do. In such a case if/when it is found out I really think the supervisor should be help partially accountable!
Finally,I realise I have come down quite hard on the uni/supervisor in my post. Obviously none of this can occur if the student doesn't attempt to cheat. But I do feel that the student should be encouraged to do their own work and "aided" by a system that rewards their own work while making cheating a risky and unrewarding option.
So when i was in high school and the lazy rich kids that i saw there paid the smart ones to do their work for them. . . they were just "outsourcing"!?
The problem here is that by the time these students in the UK and US, will be totally unprepared when they reach their jobs in whatever sector they end up in they'll be so unprepared for whatever they'll be doing they'll likely end up on the street.
I've been outsourceing my replies to /. for about the last three weeks. (why do you think I bothered to start logging on?)
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
They just don't know the purpose of going to uni
When the people that is outsourcing today become in the future the people that grade the work.
They can outsource that as well.... just imaging someone in Romania being asked first to write a complex piece of software and then a week after being asked to rate his own project!
The downside is someone else is doing your heavy mental lifting for you. Laziness and expedience are only an asset if they make you smarter. This may help you win tody's battle, but it will almost certainly cost you tomorrow's war.
I remember when calculators first came out. Having had traditional math, and gone the next levels to some more interesting mathematical thinking including number theory... studying the universe had context... Avagadro's Number had weight and meaning, Plank's Constant and the Speed of Light have relevance. The width of the visible universe actually means something and there are elegant ideas worth grasping here.
Today kids take calculators for granted. Sadly they enter a number incorrectly and come up with a ridiculous answer to the question they thought they were asking, and they don't even notice the answer is ridiculous. Wrong by orders of magnitude, but their Pavlovian trust in the calculator and their lack of getting their hands (and minds) dirty in with the business end of numbers has them at great disadvantage.
Someday, that you student will be competing in a world market against the young Indian Man who did his dissertation for him... who do you think will fair best???
When I first discovered Rent-A-Coder back when I was unemployed, it was immediately obvious that 95% of the projects up there were CS assignments/homework. The funny part was, that in my cases, the materials linked back to their professors' web pages, or were easily Google-able.
So what did I do? I decided to be a rat - I contacted all of the professors that I could, and in one case, the professor himself did a sting operation by "bidding" to do the work.
(Of course, I don't do this anymore given how I'm employed once again and the IT job market is as tight as it was in 1999.)
Hell, I say let them go for it. It's all fun and games until you're fired from your first job for incompetence.
Seriously, if you skate by through college like that, you're not going to survive in the real world. Its only a matter of time until you're outed for the incompetent moron you are and given the pink slip.
LOL, lets be real, all the grunt work is going overseas. Nobody is going to be paying programmers in the US inflated wages to do work that someone better qualified and much cheaper can do over there in 10 years.
So, if you REALLY do want to learn what you're going to have to know, then managing contractors is it, because that's all the jobs that will be left.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I wanna know what's site provide such a service,to CHEATING.
I know.
I've been looking for freelance work on outsourcing sites and often you get "homework". Considering I've been to uni, I can tell how lecturers write their assignments and all these idiots just don't bother to reword them at all.
But in the long run, it'll get back to them in the end.
I can't see how it would be possible to keep track of all the outsourcing sites, since you seem to set a couple of new ones every so often. People have even asked for projects *ON* freelance sites to build more of them!
The only interesting one around is Odesk, since they have the idea of bringing groups of programmers to a project, rather than relying on a single person or "company".
I found a really blatant example on an outsourcing website. Nobody had accepted the job and the deadline was yesterday so I'm wondering if this student turned their attention to figuring out how to steal a classmate's code.
==
I need this simple Java program written for me. If you are experienced I don't think this will take you very long.
Your task in this assignment is to write a simple class definition for a vending machine. The class should have:
* Attributes
o Soda count
o Money credit (how much money has been inserted)
* Methods
o Add money
o Vend
o Restock
o Constructor
For simplicity sake, you may assume that the machine can hold up to 50 of one type of soda; you may also assume that all sodas cost $0.65. When adding money, simply take in a floating-point number representing how much money to add (i.e. you do not have to manage different coins).
Be sure to make sure that enough money was added to the machine before a soda is vended. Also, when a soda is vended, return the appropriate change (i.e. if more than $0.65 was added to the machine, then return the extra money). Again, don't worry about managing different kinds of coins â" just display the amount returned.
When the machine is "restocked," just set the soda count to the maximum that the machine will hold.
Once you have written the class, create a main/driver program that interacts with an instance of the class. Your program should present a menu of options to the user and process the userâ(TM)s choice; use creativity and object-oriented design in your solution
**Must know how many hours you will need to complete. Need this by Monday June 30.
Sounds like you were indeed successful in that lab class.
You learned more than anyone else (including the lab instructor).
I put a curse to you and all other readers.
"May you succeed in some academic or programming project that you originally felt far beyond your capabilities. May you succeed so well that you are actually PROUD of your accomplishment. May this pride stay with you and make you try to repeat this success in all of your future projects. May you feel frustration when circumstances work against you and you fail. May the memory of your wonderful success make you quit jobs, create things, and learn every single minute you have left to you."
CURSE YOU -- DAMMIT.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted