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.

Comments

Just deserts...

[blahplusplus]

... this is what you get in a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty.

Re:Just deserts...

[apodyopsis]

Really?

I would of phrased that another way.

..this is what you get in a society when everybody believes that they deserve everything and yet everybody is unwilling to do any hard work.

Re:Just deserts...

[Anonymous Coward]

>..this is what you get in a society when everybody believes that they deserve everything and yet everybody is unwilling to do any hard work.

Funny, I would have said this is what you get in a society that values a piece of paper over hard work.

You can work 10x harder, 10x faster, and 10x smarter than the guy next to you, but if you didn't finish high-school/college/university, you won't get the better job.

Re:Just deserts...

[trolltalk.com]

I agree, however, my Ph. D. adviser once offered to write my dissertation for $3,000, which at the time (being a poor student), was a ridiculous amount of money (and immoral to boot).

In retrospect, I should've taken a loan and paid him to do it, it would've been easier and far more ethical than actually writing it myself.

If you think that's ethical, you deserve whatever shit life hands you.

What you should have done was gotten the offer on tape, and reported him/her. This would have served the purpose of leveling the playing field, so that those who are ethically corrupt and financially flush (funny how the two seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of times) don't have an unfair advantage.

Re:Just deserts...

[nine-times]

I would have said something more like:

... this is what you get in a competitive society where everyone is taught that "work" is an evil thing to be avoided at all costs.

That assumes we're talking about the US of course. We Americans are really proud of our work ethic, yet we teach our children that work is evil, struggling is stupid, and the ideal situation is one where everyone is handed everything on a silver platter.

Really, if you look at what's being taught by parents and by the public school system, that's one of the chief messages we send to our kids. It wasn't until I got into college (a small private college) that I realized that there was actually value in the work itself. That sometimes (particularly in education) end-result (i.e. good grades and eventually a degree) isn't the most important thing.

I mean, you listen to people talk, and they talk about how college is great because it opens so many doors, and a college diploma provides so many opportunities. That's all backwards. College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide.

Re:Just deserts...

[sticks_us]

If you think that's ethical, you deserve whatever shit life hands you.

What you should have done was gotten the offer on tape, and reported him/her. This would have served the purpose of leveling the playing field, so that those who are ethically corrupt and financially flush (funny how the two seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of times) don't have an unfair advantage.

Well, I don't think paying someone to do it is ethical, but I also believe a lot of dissertation work gets done under shifty circumstances (or, at the very least, requiring an inordinate amount of humiliation, degradation, and ass-kissing). So I guess it becomes a "lesser of two evils" thing.

As for getting it on tape--you're 110% correct. I kick myself to this day for not having a portable recorder.

Re:Just deserts...

[zifn4b]

..this is what you get in a society when everybody believes that they deserve everything and yet everybody is unwilling to do any hard work.

I disagree. I think what's happening is that society is becoming wise to common business practices. They realize that businesses have absolutely no loyalty to their employees. The employees at a company are merely a means to generate shareholder value. Make no mistake, they will cut your benefits, lay you off, not follow through on promises if it's in the interest of their bottom line.

State and Federal governments are really no different. For the most part, they placate the masses just enough to move their own agendas forward whether they're in your best interest of not.

This is raising a generation of people that see no reason not to cheat the system because they watch corporations and government do it all the time. They wonder why they should uphold a standard of honor that no one else is and have it be at their own expense.

Re:Just deserts...

[Free the Cowards]

College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide. That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day. If this is the best opportunity that college can provide, there's no reason to go. Get a job! Then you can not only learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, you can get paid for it too!

The point of college is to gain an education and grow intellectually. Learning how to get stuff done is certainly part of it, but it's not the only, or even the biggest, part of it. If that's all you need then there's no need to pay for the experience.

Re:Just deserts...

[aztracker1]

Well, personally I have been doing a *LOT* of reading on those areas that I want to work in... I look for personal projects that can take advantage of newer, or newly learned technology. Participating on FLOSS, or even volunteering with a non-profit agency works as well. Getting a super low-level grunt job, and taking on extra responsibilities is probably the best potential for a foot in the door.

I'm now pretty well off in my field, but it takes hard work, and time one way or another... it's not impossible, or even all that hard to get your foot in the door. To be honest though, it takes about as much time to gain "experience" as you would have taken going through college, but after 5+ years or so, it balances out.

The other aspect is truly understanding what it is you are going to be doing. For programmers it comes down to not just knowing your language(s) of choice, but knowing something about software design. Reading "Learn X in 24hrs" isn't enough, reading up on RAD, or Agile principles is equally, or more important. Understanding data models, etc... Starting off with a good basic understanding of a given language is generally enough to get you in the door somewhere.

In interviews, if you don't know something, don't pretend you do. Say you don't know it, if you can speculate, state that what you are saying is speculation. Then move on to the next question. The fact is nobody can possibly know everything, especially in IT, as the entire base of knowledge and/or techniques grows exponentially. You're better off having a good base of knowledge, at least exposure, or knowledge of different systems, and the ability to learn and adapt quickly. IT is as much thinking around problems as it is working through them.

Re:Just deserts...

[GospelHead821]

It bears mentioning that, because of the global nature of many corporations, the work that most people do is impersonal and uninspiring. Assembly line structures may be efficient ways to generate wealth but I have grown tired of our society that defines value in terms of wealth.

I can certainly sympathize with somebody who sees hard work as evil, if his work provides value for somebody he never sees and is measured based upon the amount of wealth that it generates. That really is evil, in my opinion.

Re:Just deserts...

[nine-times]

That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day. If this is the best opportunity that college can provide, there's no reason to go. Get a job! Then you can not only learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, you can get paid for it too!

And then, because there will be consequences, you'll be incredibly limited in what you can do and which sorts of work you can try out. Once you're saddled with all those consequences, you really will have to focus on accomplishing things and not screwing up. You'll have to focus on the end-results specifically. And because you don't have experience and don't know how to work correctly, an awful lot of the fun work is going to be kept away from you because you can't be trusted to do it.

College, on the other hand, is the perfect place to gain the experience of working in a wide variety of contexts on a wide variety of tasks. In my job, if I'm not a good presenter, then any decent boss will keep me away from presenting. A college class that involves presentations is going to be my best opportunity to work on presentations and get good at them before it matters.

I have never met anyone who doesn't screw up royally on their first job, and sometimes that sort of thing can virtually ruin a career. If you do it right, college can be like being your own boss, running your own projects, and working in the way that work really should be done.

Re:Just deserts...

[Free the Cowards]

Why is this site full of such dumbfucks? I mean, seriously. You could find a higher average intelligence in an ant farm.

Where did I say that I did no work? Oh that's right, I never said that. You just made it up, then acted like I said it because, I dunno, you're a total jackass.

I worked hard in college, but that was not why I was there. I was there to get an education. The work was a necessary component, not a goal.

Pathetic

[kmsigel]

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.

Re:Pathetic

[phpmysqldev]

We always got quizzed and had to explain our logic, etc after turning in a major project. Just because you can produce a working program doesn't mean you understand the concept, outsourced or not.

Re:Pathetic

[snl2587]

Really, this is nothing more than an indicator that some people going into programming are clearly in the wrong field.

That being said, I don't know anyone personally who is becoming a programmer for any other reason than they really enjoy it. Kind of sucks if you don't.

Re:Pathetic

[darthflo]

Let's see...
Earn, say, $5000 per Month working on something for two months.
Pay, say, $3000 for that project to be done in India or wherever.
Make $7k (per concurrent employment) while at the same time programming whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it. Sure sounds like a ton of fun.

Re:Pathetic

[v1k]

How long before your contract realizes they too can send it to India and get it done for $3000, leaving you with $0?

Re:Pathetic

[TheLink]

They might not want to manage the outsourcee, etc.

Re:Pathetic

[ZeroExistenZ]

Just because you can produce a working program doesn't mean you understand the concept, outsourced or not.

Yes, agreed. But there's a difference between logical reasoning and understanding and actual implementation.

Basically you're saying, in this context; "I understand the logical approach. So there's no need for me to put time in implementing it. A monkey without any sense of logic could produce a program with the same output."

So you'd like someone, who you value "unable to understand the deeper underlaying logic", to write your program representing the way you understood the problem and how it could be solved?

It's to me also a very troubling progress; people being trained to become programmers or who will have to program, but already ,before being skilled enough or having any experience, have the attitude "oh, I can outsource it!". Once those end up in the industry, what are those worth? "I can't be bothered with it. Let them outsource it"... And everyone throws their arms in the ari "oh noes, were are our jobs going?"

Having done alot of projects "in the real world", it's rarely who put the project together who are the ones brainstorming how to make it fit more logcally without breaking the design. Those "finger in air"-documents, created by those with a simular attitude, without practical "hands on" knowledge *think* it's all fitting as a glove. But once you try to implement it you're bumping into alot of surprices and burning money with heaps.
Ideally someone with alot of practical knowledge should lead these sorts of projects just for this reason. But where are you at when you're even not willing to gather a bit of experience, because it seems "unnecessary"?
It's a combination of experience and skill (ability to logically understand the whole), to verify your analysis into practice, link back and evolve in your skillsets that help you to be better at what you do.

I've stood at both sides in projects, and it's also not as straightforwards to come up with something that works perfectly. It all might be very logical, it's not definite and bringing it into being, you always have a surprice here and there.

There's never perfection and you never know enough, each day I still learn and finetune my skills. If you're starting to outsource your potential even before you can assign yourself a certain title, it's a bit of a dubious thing to do.

It reminds me of this engineer, taking huge pride in a job well done after his equations and calculations were all perfectly done, with added whitenoise buffers calculated to the point he felt he could be pleased with himself and nothing could go wrong. The moment his creation came into being, he spent weeks finding the "sweetspot" to make it work. His clash with the "pure theory and logic" and the actual world were a tough lesson.

Re:Pathetic

[mmkkbb]

Never, because you charge $5000, kick back $1000 to the guy who signs the paycheck, and send it to India for $3000, pocketing $1000. This is not a new phenomenon, and is probably in every ethics textbook and training course.

Re:Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

We always got quizzed and had to explain our logic, etc after turning in a major project. Just because you can produce a working program doesn't mean you understand the concept, outsourced or not. Unfortunately, in my classes that's not the case. My classes have been made up of programming majors who hate to write code. They all copy-and-paste each others' code, turn it in, and the instructor doesn't ask any questions about it.

It also doesn't help that the "instructor" comes in hungover and in lieu of teaching, she basically has people type code along with her, without explaining any of the theory. She also just gives us powerpoint slides.

I've pretty much been teaching myself programming on my own.

Re:Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

Any CS major caught doing this should immediately be transferred to the Management program !!!

An excellent argument...

[slk]

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.

Re:An excellent argument...

[CastrTroy]

I like the idea, but requiring people to handwrite papers probably wouldn't do much to stop the whole thing. You could easily get the guy in India to show all his work, scan it, and send the files to you. Then all you have to do is copy it verbatim. I knew a girl who had a professor who insisted that papers be handwritten, saying something about curbing cheaters. Really, it made people more likely to cheat, because of the increased time it would take for them to write it out by hand. I think most people in her class just wrote the whole thing on the computer, which made editing easier, and then copied out the final product. The whole process just makes it harder on the honest students. I think that a good solution, is to place way more emphasis on exams or other more verifiable means of grading students.

Re:An excellent argument...

[Dolohov]

Eh, this is common, and not necessarily indicative of a lie. I've written a lot of C code in my time, but for the last four months my job has had me writing only Java -- if someone were to sit me down to do a practical C test, I'd probably do pretty poorly after being out of it (and thinking in OO mode) for so long. If you're getting people just out of their Masters, you're getting people who had to stop what they were doing and write a Master's thesis, which seems to me like a similar obstacle to proper thinking.

Re:An excellent argument...

[raddan]

Also, the problem domain in C *really* influences the style of code. And by style, I don't just mean do you write braces on the same line or next line, I mean:

• Do you rely on the preprocessor for common constants and macros?
• How many system facilities do you need to use?
• Are you going to attempt an object-oriented approach?
• Who else is reading your code?
• What is the expected lifetime of the program?

The answers to these questions and many more can dramatically affect how a program in C is put together. I thought I was a pretty good C programmer until I recently started having to do some systems programming. It's like a completely different language now.

So talk to the student?

[Toad-san]

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...

[Comatose51]

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.

Re:Well...

[RMH101]

Any good? No, but they'll be just about acceptable and they're cheap: which as any Finance Director knows, will be good enough for a couple of years, whilst he writes on his CV that he's saved X million USD and the company turns to crap around him.

You mean there are companies that *don't* do this?

Universities~=Corporate america

[COMON$]

I see this as a direct result of the overloading of the Universities. When you have a prof teaching classrooms of 400 students, checking for cheating becomes practically impossible. I went to a smaller university where the ratio was significantly smaller. The profs could tell if another student wrote your code by style. That and in my university you had to comment like a mad fool, which depending on who you outsourced to might be a dead giveaway.

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.

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[kellyb9]

Sir, you are dead on. Just to add a little bit, I feel as though colleges have become far to lenient with who they are letting in. The standards have dropped much lower because it's becoming nearly impossible to find decent work without a B.S. in something. Colleges need to raise their standards. There are simply far too many areas of study where doing the bare minimum will afford you a decent grade. It almost seems that you need to go on with your education anymore to learn anything useful.

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[VeNoM0619]

You are really only stating the catch 22:

Making it hard for people to graduate
Leads to people complaining that there aren't enough educated people

This debate will go back and forth for a long time. Either dumb down the courses so more people can get into the "more smarter jobs for america" or make them harder so we have truely intelligent people but "not enough smart people in america".

Either way lazy people are going to cash in, but let's face it, it's becoming human nature to be lazy.

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[Oxy the moron]

And so the dominoes continue to fall. Look even more closely at K-12 public schools. You want to talk about "simply dish out information and the students memorize?" That's what the typical K-12 education is right there. This is part of the problem with standardized tests at this phase in a student's life. In K-12, you should be taught how to think and problem solve as the basis for later in your education. Instead, we consider it progress if they know when the war of 1812 was fought. After all, getting answers "right" improves standardized test scores. Knowing why it was fought, its ramifications, and what we need to learn from it doesn't do anything to bring more $$$ into the school system.

Then you can go even farther back and look at how parents don't teach their kids anything until they get to school (after all, it's the school's job!) and the problem just keeps getting worse.

America has become a society where education just isn't valued. I could go on and on...

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[Anonymous Coward]

What does it matter if they raise their standards? Cheating doesn't start in college. Those that cheat at the university level have cheated at the high school level, at the middle school level, in extracurriculars, etc. Which means that unless they are detected somehow, they will always be what collegiate institutions consider the cream of the crop.

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[Anonymous Coward]

Watching someone who is current TA for a University professor, all I can say is, They really don't give a fuck. Of the 15 of so professors she interacts with daily, 1 like teaching students. The other consider students a nusance/pests, and the part of there job that sucks and they have to do. Cause once they finish teaching that course, they can go back to the real reason they are at the university. Research (ie: there own..).

It's pretty hilarious actually, cause 4-5 of the teachers are having there TA and RA re-do there research to make it look nicer (without putting there name on it).

This is her 3rd University, and apparently they've all been the same.

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[COMON$]

The purpose of a university is not to graduate people, the purpose of a University is to EDUCATE people. This idea of dumbing down courses does no one a favor. There are vo-tech colleges for people who cant handle universities. Not that they are not hard, but they are vo-tech, they are meant to crank out one trick horses as fast as possible.

Leads to people complaining that there aren't enough educated peopleA piece of paper does not mean you are educated, especially if all your classes were dumbed down so you didn't actually retain any useful knowledge. This is why the system does not work. The fact that you seem to be on the down the courses so more people can get into the "more smarter jobs for america" thought path is really really sad. Essentially you are saying we need a bunch of sub par people in the "smart jobs" so we should give them the same credentials as much more capable people so we can fill a seat....that is just assinine and makes credentials worthless.

Re:Universities~=Corporate america

[COMON$]

Exactly, I think there was a90% dropout rate in our program. I tutored later on and I firmly believe it is because the CS profs made us THINK and rationalize. Sure they would show us algorithms for best practices, but we had to understand the Big Oh of each search method to apply it to our programs. We learned that you learn more from making mistakes and 20 hours writing a bad method than you do getting it right the first time.

It took me forever to write a 100 line program in C++ when I first started my freshman year. By my senior year I could write the same program in 15 minutes, to the frustration of the students I was tutoring. But I learned sooo much from those mistakes that it is ingrained in me to enjoy failing because the path to the solution rewards so much more than the solution itself.

This is my beef with other educational programs, where they just give you the solution and have you memorize the anatomy of a cat, or chemical formulas rather than helping the students to figure it out themselves.

good!

[speedtux]

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.

Re:Impossible to detect?

[cerelib]

You are making the bold assumption that those professor read your work well enough to detect a lie.

Re:Impossible to detect?

[elrous0]

I wondered this as well. My MA defense was tough enough. My Ph.D. qualifyings and dissertation defense were grueling (not to mention that face time I had leading up to it with my advisor and committee). No way you can fake that or just BS your way through it (unless a computer science graduate degree works WAY differently).

Thank minimum wage

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[arivanov]

Who told you that this is outsourcing?

Farming out homework is something that has been going on since the days when the only thing that was studied in Heidelberg was theology.

There is nothing particularly new and surprising here except Internet enabling the homework to be farmed out further afield.

Further to this, a f2f examination can determine if the homework is real or not real in a matter of seconds. So anyone bitching about the practice becoming more prevalent should actually bitch about tests and assignments replacing good old f2f examination.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[HungryHobo]

Let me guess, you've never really been in poverty. The minimum wage exists for the same reason as usury laws. Desperate people get taken advantage of. Which is not ok. It's all very easy to prattle on about market forces and everyone being free to not take a job when you've never been in a situation where you need money to get to the end of the month without starving or ending up on the street. If you follow your logic forcing employers to minimum safety standards also makes it more profitable to set up somewhere without such standards. But the workers are perfectly free to work somewhere where they won't get maimed by the machinery. Right? No need for laws on working conditions. Personally I'm not mad on the idea of giving employers the chance to pay sweatshop wages. Outsourcing in general is not caused by the minimum wage.Outsourcing in general is caused by the existance of countries which lack of any kind of workers rights, minimum wage or safety standards.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[blueg3]

In general, outsourcing is caused by labor being cheaper in a different area.

A minimum wage is one specific reason (not general) why labor might be cheaper in one area than another.

Of course, unless you're implying that the minimum wage significantly influences the wages of workers who earn well above the minimum wage, much outsourcing (like IT outsourcing) isn't caused by minimum wage.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Mycroft_514]

Minimum wage is not SUPPOSED to be a living wage. And every time you raise minimum wage, you actually CUT the pay of everyone else in the country. Why? Because inflation is keyed to minimum wage. And not everyone gets a raise when minimum wage goes up. And when mimnimum wage goes up, many new jobs are eliminated fromt eh private secotr, because small business can't afford them, so they do without and businesses fail or not.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[TheAngryIntern]

funny how you're calling him out claiming he needs to provide evidence when you never provided any evidence that minmum wage causes outsourcing. You just stated your opinion on the matter.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[HungryHobo]

I have to prove that minimum safety standards make it more expensive to set up a buisness?

People still need food/shelter to survive. it's true. Problem is that while getting rid of the minimum wage causes all those lovely efficient changes in the economy it also creates an underclass who get paid just enough to survive and nothing more.
those who benefit most are the people at the top who's buying power is suddenly multiplied.
You want an example? Pick some 3rd world countries with no minimum wage.
How about this, give me an example, any example at all of a country with no minimum wage where it hasn't lead to horrible living conditions for a large chunk of the population.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[HungryHobo]

I agree that sometimes unions go too far.
Particularly when they don't let anyone who isn't a member of the union do a job.

In the town where I live there is a park.
It's a mess.
The local boyscouts decided to clean up the park.
They got a permit from the local council.
They started work.
The council workers union decided that by cleaning up the park the boyscouts were potentially taking work away from union members and threatened to strike.
The permit was pulled.
No work was ever done.
The park is still a mess...

Of course there is a worthwile side to unions.
If a union is asking too much then a company can just fire everyone who's on strike and replace them. if it's cheaper to give the union members better pay then it stands to reason that the union members were being undervalued up to this point.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Qzukk]

If all property were privately-owned, it would be much more difficult for you to pollute without facing consequences from your neighbors.

Yeaaaaah... no.

What about all the pollution out there that lands on property that is privately-owned? I guess they're just too lazy to look at the little "From:" tags tied to the benzene rings or bits of soot to try and sue the corporations that released them.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Free the Cowards]

Why would it not be outsourcing? Outsourcing refers to anything that you pay someone else to do instead of doing it yourself. It's only in bizarro-world Slashdot land that "outsourcing" has this ridiculously specific definition of "recent activities involving paying overseas software companies instead of using in-house programmers".

Re:Thank minimum wage

[SatanicPuppy]

Yes and no. It's like coal power; sure it's cheap electricity, but it's cheap mainly because the costs in terms of pollution and illness are unaccounted for.

China is a great example of the dangers of ignoring the environment; hell, there is still an article on the front page of /. about it. Ftfa 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. Sure, they produce cheap plastic crap cheaper than anyone else, but those costs will catch up with them and they will have to be paid.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[alan_dershowitz]

Conversely, the minimum wage helps retain a basic standard of living in the United States if jobs that are truly not profitable in our country are moved out of the country. People don't have access to all the facts, so you can get yourself into a situation where people can't make a truly rational choice for products and everyone just chooses cheap, unreliable, unsafe products on their extremely low wages. So absolutely we can get rid of the minimum wage and other government controls, but that's the equivalent of choosing to be a third-world country.

What is your position on unions? I've noticed that people who promote the things that you do being intensely anti-union despite the fact that the only way that workers can effectively demand higher wages and better working conditions you folks claim they could if they want is, well, collectively.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Vancorps]

You are also ignoring history which states otherwise. Why do you think minimum wage laws and unions were formed in the first place?

Losing minimum wage has shown itself to send a whole populous down into poverty. You need only look at the average income of an American over the last 100 years to see that when you make more money your quality of life goes up. More people today are making more money and enjoy a much higher quality of life than my grand parents did during the depression.

Parent was correct in calling your naive, either that or willfully ignorant.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[ElleyKitten]

"Outsourcing in general is not caused by the minimum wage."

You're going to have to provide some evidence to support this. If the whole purpose of business is to make money, and companies can make more money by paying less to workers, then it is obvious that the minimum wage is going to drive jobs away. That would be true if most of the most of the jobs outsourced would pay minimum wage in America. Let's think of some common jobs that are outsourced - programmers, call centers, factories - their American counterparts make 2-3 times the federal minimum wage on the low end (yes, factory workers make more than min wage - do you think anyone would work in a factory if they could work at a less dangerous job for the same amount of money?). Outsourcing didn't happen so that companies could pay $1 an hour instead of $5, it happened so that they could pay $1 an hour instead of $20. Removing minimum wage won't bring those jobs back, because it's not going to make American programmers take $1 an hour. The only way to make America compete with 3rd world countries on wages is to make America a 3rd world country.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[pegdhcp]

When I started to give some courses in my old school -which fortunately did not last much- first thing I realized was that it was unbelievably easy for the instructor to see what is going on, during classes, during exams, and naturally home works and/or assignments etc. Any teacher who want to help the development of his/her pupils, just needs to watch them and _really_ read their papers.

"The problem is definitely getting worse, it is hard to detect, the number of these sites is spreading all the time and it is impossible for us to monitor all of them." If these gentlemen in the FA want to do their job correctly, maybe it would be better to concentrate on their students, instead of these cheating sites. I agree with them it is not possible to track all sites. I had a friend who established a publishing company by using his income from his "home work helper" site. It is one of the hidden (still) sectors of the Internet, like book selling before Amazon's success.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

At my university, all the student workers received a pay raise to the new minimum...at the same time the price of everything on campus...also increased in price.

You probably have had your nose in the books but everyone has been paying more since last November not just your college town. Take a look at the price of oil then and now and think about how that might translate into higher prices for everything you mention.

Increasing the minimum wage just accelerates inflation.

Except there have been hundreds of studies done on the minimum wage and nothing even close to acceptable proof of that. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since it was first passed it would now be around $11/hr. As it currently stands, increases in the federal minimum wage does nothing to most local economies because no one would work for it anyway. In my area, beginning jobs at Wendy's pay $2/hr more than the current minimum.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Vancorps]

Where are you getting these insane ideas? Have you ever visited a textile mill? People were dying in sweatshop housing going further and further into debt while trying to get ahead. They were fed the bare minimum and endured extremely dangerous conditions.

OSHA was created because of several large fires at textile mills which killed hundreds at a time. These conditions weren't limited to textile mills but they were the beginnings of America becoming a manufacturing powerhouse around the turn of the last century.

You'll note despite the minimum wage being established in particularly Lowell Massachusetts in 1912 that the state became a one of the largest producers of textiles. Similarly when minimum wage was introduced nationally in 1938 that the United States as a whole became a world leader. Minimum wage doesn't take all the credit, the war had a lot to do with it but when a larger percentage of your population becomes consumers everyone wins.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[krunk7]

I'm a capitalist. As a capitalist I'm a staunch adherent to free & fair market competition. The existence of unions is essential to this equation. The reason being that a business, especially large business, is essentially a business union.

There must be a counterweight to this collusion for any market to remain healthy. Even Adam Smith recognized this:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Adam Smith

"...or to lower wages." Is easily added to this observation as the spirit of quote is that that trade unions (*cough* corporations) will always try to maximize profits. This is not a bad thing, but we must allow workers to form their own groups and counter balance this force with one of their own: To maximize individual profits and ensure safe conditions.

The real travesty is not out sourcing, but the lack of penalty (financially) for a business model that takes advantage of states or nations that do not adhere to these essential principles of a free & fair market (and worker) equality.

However, Adam Smith's advocacy of a living wage and unions did not stop there.

"It is but equity...that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." -Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Of course, the cunning slashdotter libertarian may respond "but what is 'tolerably'? Should everyone have a TV and a computer? Let the market decide!" Our estimable Father of Free Market Capitalism did not stop here, but made absolutely clear what "tolerable" should mean:

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.

If, as we oft hear, we are now in a global economy and so boundaries between economies should be torn down, then so too should the boundaries of "tolerable" existence be destroyed as well. If a company wishes to sell its goods to the Western nation's, it is by the standards of those that these outsourced workers "feed, clothe and lodge" that their income should be determined.

One may pose the rebuttal that this would negate the benefit of outsourcing, but is utter hogwash. First, let's investigate what is meant by "tolerable existance" by posing a simple question (I borrow this from John Cassidy, New Yorker Economist, paraphrased for brevity). "What lack of affluence would such a society, in general, view as a point of shame?" In Western society, most would consider the inability to afford a television a rather embarassing state to be in...one can be had for a mere 100 American dollars or even less. By this metric, we should pay outsourced workers an amount capable of producing this level of success in their own economies, which is quite a bit less.

Thus, out sourcing to nations for cheaper labor is not an inherently bad thing. However, when this is done with the aim of abusing lax labor, environmental, and other measures necessary for the worker to enjoy a level of success seen in the nation doing the sourcing, i

A self-correcting problem

[MikeRT]

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.

Does this show how useless a Degree is?

[pillageplunder]

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.

Minimum wage and other laws

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Minimum wage and other laws

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"If it takes our kids working in coal mines 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, so be it."

Pithy, frightening scenarios backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded no matter how frightening.

"The first goal of American government is to protect the profitability of domestic and foreign businesses"

Actually the first and only goal of the government should be to uphold the rights of its citizenry, but feel free to continue to mischaracterize.

Re:Minimum wage and other laws

[DM9290]

"If it takes our kids working in coal mines 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, so be it."

Pithy, frightening scenarios backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded no matter how frightening.

"The first goal of American government is to protect the profitability of domestic and foreign businesses"

Actually the first and only goal of the government should be to uphold the rights of its citizenry, but feel free to continue to mischaracterize.

When something like the industrial revolution and political economics is so widely documented there is no need for anyone to waste time rehashing the evidence on some online blog for the amusement of people who are too lazy to do their basic homework. Why don't you get your head out of Thomas Pains ass and pay attention to the actual world.

The poster was not saying what the goal of the American government SHOULD BE, he was saying what the goal of the American government ACTUALLY IS.

If America was so concerned about protecting human rights, it wouldn't spend so much time trying to privatize absolutely everything, deny global warming, and try to impose democracy with a gun on others. And and don't forget about preventing non-coalition countries from bidding on reconstruction contracts in Iraq. No.. that's not essentially a scheme to raise the cost of reconstruction and increase profits for american companies at the expense of Iraqi citizens.

Re:Minimum wage and other laws

[c6gunner]

Why do you explain that many countries in the world are still exploiting children if the technology advancement were more profitable ?

They don't have the capital to invest in the technology, while they DO have a surplus of labour. It's simple economics.

Re:Minimum wage and other laws

[Opportunist]

I think it says more about the times we're in and that someone can actually say something like that without sounding like some slavedriver factory owner.

Hell, I could see those words coming from politicians. But without the sarcasm flags raised.

Re:Minimum wage and other laws

[Sapphon]

the first and only goal of the government should be to uphold the rights of its citizenry. (Emphasis added)

Bollocks. What about the provision public goods (e.g. national defence)? Market regulation? Wealth redistribution? Welfare isn't a "right", you know. What about representation on an international level?

Your characterisation of a government's primary role may be (well, is) closer to the truth than that of the GP, but your oversimplification hasn't helped any.

Pithy, frightening scenarios backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded no matter how frightening.

Blanket rejections backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded, _because_ they lead to false rejections of scenarios that may be true. How about some critical thought here?

Re:Minimum wage and other laws

[ppanon]

So that's why most clothing that is bought is made in North America and not in sweatshops in SE Asia or the Dominican Republica! Oh wait, it's the other way around and the NA/European clothing manufacturing industry sucks except for haute couture. I think there's something wrong with your argument.

Yeah, open pit mining is more efficient at extracting some types of resources. But if you were trying to get coal a couple of Km down, and it was legal to use child labour at a fraction of the wages of adults without needing to worry about black lung protection, I think you'd find kids in coal mines again pretty quickly.

Colleges don't have a choice.

[Shivetya]

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.

Outsource Dissertation Evaluations

[repetty]

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.

Try putting some effort in Prof

[sheepofblue]

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.

A new reality!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sad...

[neowolf]

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.

India and the world

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Clever but self defeating

[Waffle Iron]

Well yeah, I learned something from that episode, too. After that, I turned down requests from people wanting me to whip off programming assignments, and I told them that they'd end up better off if they just forced themselves to work through it.

Re:i can do it faster and better than any indian

[catmistake]

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. That seems to be a common theme among the posters here... each one immenantly confident in their skills, and each smarter than everyone else. Surely, you and they are all self-deluded, self-absorbed and arrogant. I, for one, never make mistakes myself, and always find simpler solutions to problems than anyone else... although I used to think as you and they do... years ago... but I have overcome these lame social self-awareness issues and now I am perfect in every way.

DO the math

[kcdoodle]

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.