Student cheats outsource their work to India

Un ancien collègue, toujours en exercice, m'adresse un pointeur qui me mène ICI

Mais je sais que nos étudiants ne vont pas amener un dollar à ces sociétés ... à quoi bon ! nos ministres ont institué la réussite pour tous. Et big is beautiful. Si une université veut une large palette de formations, des moyens etc, il faut qu'elle produise du diplômé. Pauvres indiens, ils ne vont pas s'enrichir avec nous sur ce terrain.

Asher Moses
July 4, 2008


COMPUTER science students are farming out their course work to cheap programmers in countries such as India, and university staff admit they are powerless to detect and prevent the practice.

Sites such as RentACoder and Kasamba, which maintain a network of low-cost coders around the world, offer businesses help with computer programming. But dishonest students have already seized on the outsourcing trend to avoid doing homework.

Assignments are put out to tender on the sites and coders bid to complete them. Students pay anywhere from under $100 to several hundred dollars, depending on the work required.

The practice is not limited to programming. Various well-established sites already sell students essays and other written work. But with code, it is far harder to spot outsourcing.

"I think it's a growing issue as a form of misconduct that universities are going to have to take seriously, and at the moment our defences are weak," said David Wilson, the associate dean of teaching and learning for information technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. "We're aware that it happens and we're catching some people but I think that's the tip of the iceberg."

Part of the problem, said Paul Compton, head of the school of computer science and engineering at the University of NSW, was that automated plagiarism detection tools, such as Turn It In, could not detect outsourced work.

They can only blow the whistle if several students submit similar assignments or if work has passages copied from the internet. "The rent-a-coder stuff is almost impossible to pick up," Professor Compton said.

"If the coder provides the same solution to a few students we'll catch them via plagiarism detection but if they only provide it to one student you essentially can't catch them."

James Thom, acting head of RMIT's school of computer science, said even if a lecturer was suspicious, proving misconduct under university policy was difficult. To combat the problem, university staff scour the rent-a-coder sites looking for topics they have assigned.

But even this is fraught with difficulty as tech-savvy computer science students typically use an email address and alias that makes it difficult to trace them.

Another strategy was to conduct more examinations supervised by university staff, instead of placing emphasis on take-home assignments.

"We include questions that test their knowledge of the assignment [so they] can't really answer the question unless they have done a lot of work on it," Professor Compton said.

A 2006 study conducted by researchers at the University of Central England in Birmingham found more than 12 per cent of postings on a popular rent-a-coder site were bid requests from dishonest students. "We know that it's sufficiently widespread for us to be worried," Professor Wilson said.

"Whether it's widespread enough to undermine the value of everything we do, we don't think it's at that level."