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I read an article today about university students outsourcing their uni studies through websites called RentACoder and Kasamba. There are other websites out there called Elance and Guru that do the same thing. You can write down what work you want done, post it on the outsourcing website and wait for the incoming bids from service providers from all over the world including India, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

In the article, it discusses computer science students using these outsourcing services to have their programming assignments done by other people overseas. Perhaps it is more worthwhile for them to find part time work - being paid around $20 per hour and trading it with the arbitrage advantage of outsourcing with hourly rates starting from $2 per hour.

But don't stop with Bachelor of IT or Science in computing sciences. You can apply this outsourcing magic with any uni course. Journalism - you can hire people to do your research for you. Engineering - similar with programming - hire someone to "show you" how to do things, calculate equations, etc. Commerce - assignments can be tendered out to the best bidder. What if you can outsource the actual exam taking? You could probably do it with those computer multiple choice questions. Good luck!

Uni cheats outsource to India

Computer Science students are farming out their coursework to cheap programmers in countries like India and university staff admit they are powerless to detect and prevent it.

Internet sites such as RentACoder and Kasamba provide an international marketplace connecting businesses in need of computer programming help with low-cost coders around the world.

But dishonest students have already seized on the outsourcing trend to avoid doing homework.

Typically, assignments are put out to tender on the internet sites and coders bid to complete them.

Students can pay anywhere from under $100 to several hundred dollars, depending on the amount of work required.

The practice isn't limited to programming.

Various well-established sites already sell students essays and other written work.

But with code, which is far more black and white than the written word, it's 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, associate dean of teaching and learning for information technology at the University of Technololgy, 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 New South Wales, was that existing automated plagiarism detection tools, such as Turn It In, can't detect outsourced work.

They could only tell if multiple students submitted highly similar assignments or if a piece of work had passages copied from the internet.

"The rent-a-coder stuff is almost impossible to pick up," said Professor Compton.

"If the coder provides the same solution to a few students we'll catch them via the 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 the way university policy requires is highly problematic.

"Certain situations arise where it's very clearly happened but being able to have enough to take action against the students - or what sort of action to take - can be difficult," he said.

To combat the problem, university staff scour the rent-a-coder sites looking for assignments they've assigned.

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

Another strategy is to conduct more exams supervised by university staff, instead of putting a heavy emphasis on take-home assignments.

"We include questions that test their knowledge of the assignment such that you couldn't really answer the question unless you'd done a lot of work on it," said Professor Compton.

Lecturers contacted by Fairfax Media agreed unanimously that outsourcing coursework was a significant and growing problem but because of the difficulties in detecting it, it's impossible to tell exactly how widespread the practice is.

A 2006 study conducted by researchers at the University of Central England in Birmingham found over 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."

Source: "Uni cheats outsource to India"

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