Cheating Your Way to an IT Career
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Here's a sorry story: At least 1,000 students worldwide have offshored their homework to coders for India, some for as little as $10, British academics contend. |
Since 2004, academics at Britain's Birmingham City University have been tracking university students accessing computer coding websites and outsourcing their coursework to foreign IT graduates students. They estimate at least 1,000 of these students—one-third from the U.K.—as cheats.
Birmingham City U computing lecturer Thomas Lancaster, quoted on Silicon.com, says the practice is spreading as more websites spring up in places like India and Romania
Such cheating is cheap.
Students contract their work to the lowest bidder, with prices ranging from £5 ($10) for simple undergraduate coursework, to £100 ($200) for postgraduate dissertations.
Lancaster suspects the practice might be more widespread than it appears: "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. It is impossible to stop these sites being used but the academic community has to be more vigilant about the work being handed in."
