By Nick Heath, 25 June 2008 11:33
NEWS
UK IT students are hiring coders in India to complete their coursework for as little as £5 a go.
A-level and university pupils are logging onto computer coding websites and farming out their work to foreign IT graduates.
Academics at Birmingham City University have detected 1,000 students cheating worldwide since they began monitoring the websites in 2004.
The majority of these students are studying an IT-related course and about one third are from the UK.
Students contract their work to the lowest bidder, with prices ranging from £5 for simple undergraduate coursework, to £100 for postgraduate dissertations.
Birmingham City computing lecturer Thomas Lancaster said the practice is spreading as more websites spring up, particularly in India and Romania, and that it could be more prevalent as it is very difficult to detect.
Bill Gates caught on camera
Check out 30 years of tech's most famous name here
Plus don't miss out on Gates getting creamed
Lancaster and fellow City lecturer Robert Clarke are calling on the government to set up a national database of university assignments so they can be matched against contract requests on coding websites and traced back to students.
Lancaster said: "We have seen examples of whole final year dissertations being contracted out and submitted in stages to match when the work needs to be handed in.
"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."
He added: "It is impossible to stop these sites being used but the academic community has to be more vigilant about the work being handed in."
Lancaster and Clarke want academics to test whether students have detailed knowledge about their work by questioning them about work they have handed in.
Comments
There are 15 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
it's a logical conclusion to offshoring I guess
very sad though
2. Mike Poole
Perfect (but sad). At least our IT graduates will know how to outsource when they get their first job!
3. Matt H
It'll be hard to come down on Students seeing as business is carrying out this practice! It'd be a case of kettle and pot! :D
4. Simon
Not new. This sort of thing went on when I was a student all those years ago - it was just more localised as it was 'pre-internet' and so there wasn't the mechanism for matching tasks with foreign suppliers.
Still, any students using this service should fit in well with modern business - don't need to know anything, outsource to the cheapest, sit back an let others do the work.
5. Chan Lee Meng
Seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth. If you're caught doing it, you'll get a failing grade at the very least, or you may even get expelled.
Most programmers will tell you that it is harder to figure out someone else's code than to write your own.
Also, outsourcing is no magic bullet, and programmers in India (or wherever) are just as likely to produce buggy, unoptimised code.
If you're really that lazy and unwilling to learn how to code, then you would not be able to tell whether the outsourcee's code is good or bad. So if (when) the code crashes during an inopportune moment, say, in the middle of your thesis presentation, you would not be able to fix the problem, nor even explain what it happenning.
6. Big Ian
Surely they are just showing initiative as this is how they will be working once qualified anyway :)
7. Golodh
This sort of thing, getting a third party to do your coursework, is absolutely unacceptable as students are lying when they pass off someone else's work as his own.
Comparing this sort of behaviour with outsourcing done in business or calling it "showing initiative" is pretty darned stupid and totally disregards the reason for coursework.
The objective of coursework is to reinforce learning (the vast majority will not digest what they learned and forget what they think they learned pdq unless they use it at least once) and to let the student show that he/she learned something and is now capable of applying his knowledge.
If this trend continues, what will happen is that employers will wake up and start devaluing diplomas.
Besides which, the more reputable institutions of higher learning will impose more rigorous conditions on coursework or may put more emphasis on oral and written exams at the end of the semester (less chance of cheating but more stressful on students).
Cheating is also a by-product of unfavourable student-teacher ratios, because if you follow a student's progress through e.g. weekly meetings you will find out soon enough if he/she is passing of someone's own work as their own and take action.
8. Ram B
We were thinking of doing that too as part of our IT Masters Capstone class. I am sure we could have gotten away with it as the whole outsourcing task in itself would have been quite a learning.
9. anonymous
Time to not give out coursework, and just have exams.
10. anonymous
Why not? If your IT, CS, or Engineering degree is going to be either useless or not get you a good paying job after graduation why not do what your potential employers do.
Corporations have brought this on themselves! Take away the best paying jobs and leaving only low paying service jobs only leads to DEVALUING the remaining jobs.
Why should a kid break work hard for a jobs that pay less than if they majored in something easy like business?
11. Michael Ogmios
Not fair to those who are doing the work but hardly new. Team projects usually end up being done by a single member. People have friends help them or pay someone to help them. Doesn't really matter as most coursework is crap anyway. The only reason to go to school is to get your bit of paper to wave around. Any decent geek knows way more going in than they'll be taught. It's just to get past the HR people that don't know anything except how to look at who has what bit of paper.
12. Oleg
It is easy to detect if you actually talk to students and not simply mark checkboxes. Rather than creating databases of useless rubbish, one should return to individual communication between students and academics. If you say it costs, be ready to accept unqualified grads
13. anonymous
I was suspended from my college for outsourcing a C++ coding assignment. I am curious as to how much trouble the kids in the UK are getting into? I enjoyed coding the first 6 assignments (8 total) but the last 2 I just couldn't figure out, so I figured I'd pay a tutor to code it and then walk me through so I'd understand. Guess that wasn't the right choice! Better off failing then paying to learn - oh wait, aren't I pay $40,000 a year for college? OOPS
14. anonymous
I'm sorry, is this a new thing? I started outsourcing my college work to freelance writers and my webdesign business was started and is run by freelance web programmers in India! I even outsource my happy birthday calls
Why do the work to get a degree when you can pay for it? No work, all play.
15. Karen Challinor
Anonymous - Colorado
and at the end of the day what exactly can you look back on and be proud of achieving, besides the achievement of screwing over those with more integrity than yourself.