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...

[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...

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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

[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

[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: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: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.

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.

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.