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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.
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.
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.
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.
What I don't understand is how could you possibly hand in a postgraduate dissertation which you didn't write.
Undergrad stuff, sure. There you have a few hundred students to a professor/lecturer. But postgrad?
My supervisor had exactly one student doing postgrad - me. Sure, some supervisors had up to 20 students, but still they knew exactly what those students were capable of. Someone handing in work that isn't theirs can't happen in such a situation
So maybe this isn't the result of "a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty," but instead the result of an extremely bad student to supervisor ratio.
The solution? I guess either pay more money to Universities to get more lecturers, or FLAMEBAIT make courses harder so that only few students survive END FLAMEBAIT.
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
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.
That last bit is the way things work in some other places, like Spain. Not in all universities, sure, but for example, speaking from experience, studying Civil Engineering in Madrid works like that. For starters, the undergraduate courses are a minimum of six years, plus the final project. And on the first year, with 400 new students, they separate by means of exams that only around 10 people pass, out of 400. On the easier subjects (like algebra), almost 40 to 50% people pass. This way, the result is that it takes an average of 8 or 9 years to finish (to those who finish, that is around 40% of the initial 400), but people are very well prepared to work under stress, and work hard.
So the idea is that if you get to the end of it, you might not know a lot about actually being a civil engineer, but you certainly have proved that you can work hard.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
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
the minimum wage
Well, except for the fact that nobody who wants employees has been paying minimum wage for some time now. Heck, even meatpackers pay illegal immigrants twice the minimum plus benefits.
Don't let that stop you from going off the deep end though.
If that is the case then it isn't a well-designed practical. Anybody who knows a language should be able to read some code and solve a few problems. You can't expect many interviewees to be able to churn out work up to company standards at the interview, and you shouldn't be looking for that unless you don't allow people any time to come up to speed.
How is this different then me starting a company, getting hired by another company to make X for 5000.00 and paying my workers 3000.00 for actually doing it?
The difference is my workers are not local but in india. So the same reason companies don't snipe workers from local business is the same reason they won't just go straight to india.
How can inflation be keyed to minimum wage if there aren't a significant number of people living on it?
I don't know if it says more about me or about Slashdot that I took your comment seriously (and got seriously angry) until you stated explicitly that you were being sarcastic.
"You can work 10x harder, 10x faster, and 10x smarter than the guy next to you, .."
AS someone without a degree, but makes more money then his MIT counter part, I have to disagree.
A piece of paper is nothing but a way to make initial contact.
Motivation and networking win every time.
I am posting AC because prudence is also important.
I don't agree with Vo-Tech's breeding the lazy or a place for people who don't care to go.
I go to a Vo-Tech and I get a good education in Network Administration, I am just not rich and entitled to attend a University public or private. My parents make no money, I am a single parent who has to work full time and barely make it. Spending $500+ per credit is obscene and completely not doable for someone in my position.
For example, my boyfriend's parents are loaded, he goes to the local state university. I go to a local tech college. In the 2 years it will take me to get my degree I will not have spent as much as he does in ONE semester. That is rediculous. Besides, from the people I know in HR they don't so much look at WHERE you got the degree just that you HAVE one. I am pulling 4-5 classes a semester, working full time and taking care of my kid and I think I'm working my ass off. So you may call me lazy for going to a Vo-Tech, I call you pompus for going to a university.
Refute it or accept it. Or just walk away.
States with no minimum wage (but must follow federal wage): Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee.
Poverty rate: Alabama (7th), Louisiana (2nd), Mississippi (1st), South Carolina (10th), Tennessee (11th).
Are these your idea of vibrant economies? Shouldn't they be rolling in money from all those outsourced jobs?
More than 20 state pay HIGHER than the federal minimum wage. Now YOU find reputable evidence that they have lost significant numbers of jobs? Did their hotels close? Is everyone now mowing their own lawns? Did the fast food industry collapse?
Actually there is a desert in Romania in the southern part, called "Oltenia's desert". Nothing impressive, but quite close to a desert.
Actually, we had hand-written panic-mode program design tests where we were asked to write somewhat esoteric structures on most of my CS tests.
If the answer is illegible, you don't get a grade.
You'd be surprised just how legible the handwriting of even the worst scrawler becomes when it's a pass/fail situation hinging on their penmanship.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
That works both ways, and other countries could block US exports. For example Microsoft could be banned from selling Windows in the EU, as their workers work more than 35 hours a week and don't get 10 weeks vacation. And no US food exports either as it's produced with illegal Mexican labour.
Hollywood would face problems showing their films in place where the activities of their mafia-like unions would be illegal. Your theory only works based on the assumption that the US has the world's best employment conditions.
I know it's been prevalent for as long as I've been freelancing. The end of the spring semester is always a time to pick up quick cash. Suddenly, there are 100 people who need trivial work done, desperately need it in less than 48 hours, and have seemingly inexhaustible funds with which to buy my services.
I always make sure to include excessively thorough comments and a boilerplate explanation of the basic algorithm, so they can defend their work if necessary. I would like to think that they learn the subject after all.
Fnord.
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.
Yeah, well when I was in aerospace engineering, I had a GTA who gave lab assignments once every 2 weeks, with a "required set of sections" that made each lab take about 50 pages.
Of course, everyone else just skipped the required sections, and put in "data" "results" and a short "conclusion". I did the full 50 pages, at about 1 hr per page.
In addition, there were supposed to be professionally done computer printouts that (at the time) only Harvard Graphics could handle. Since Harvard Graphics was expensive, I was the only one who wrote his own programs to produce the graphs. Most others used a pirate copy.
So I ended up spending 25 hrs/wk on these labs, turning them in 2 days late, while everyone else turned them in on time. The GTA kept delaying grading anything...
At the end of the course, he graded all of them 90, regardless of content, minus 10 points per day late. So I got a D in the course, having damaged my other grades in an effort to do well in what I thought was a very important part of my education. The administration upheld the GTA, perhaps because they decided it would be impolitic to fail 90% of the class based on their work... ... and my pressure on the issue also ended up costing me recommendations...
I think my story outdoes your story.
But we live in the society we live in. Just desserts do come, but not always. C'est la vie.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
My high school physics teacher showed us once, with practical examples, that he knows a lot more ways to cheat than we do. Even showed us a few very effective ways we did not know and could not have imagined without special technical knowledge. That day was the last time I attempted to cheat in school ... was 13 at that time.