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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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.