Outsourcing education
It appears that an alarming number of computer science students in the UK and US have taken to outsourcing their coursework to India.
From the article:
Students contract their work to the lowest bidder, with prices ranging from £5 for simple undergraduate coursework, to £100 for postgraduate dissertations.
It's an interesting and ironic form of cheating, considering that once these students graduate, and get jobs in the IT industry, those jobs will probably be outsourced to India.
Given that class sizes continue to get larger and larger in computing-related courses, it's becoming more and more difficult to check for this new form of cheating. One solution might be to have each student talk through their coursework before a grade is awarded. But with some class sizes approaching 400 students, there simply may not be time.
Some lecturers are calling for a database of assignments to be set up to allow easier comparison of submissions. How this would work, I'm not sure, as it would probably require cooperation with the Indian company facilitating the cheating.
Maybe I'll look into outsourcing blog posts. Surely there's someone else out there willing to spout nonsensical ramblings vaguely related to technology. Although with the value of the dollar the way it is, £5 seems a bit high.
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One should not think a machine improves the ethical habits of the worker.
sirsuds said,
Thu, 06/26/2008 - 11:16am -
ASTOUNDING!
Careful. You are in danger of being the first cyber "moralist" of the first order. Now that is the supreme compliment from my niche.Though you possibly would not prize the sobriquet, you will find that it settles upon you without invitation or warning. I had decided that amorality and pretentious pristine tech sense were justifiable in a dimension of existence that seems to be the purest of science. You cannot imagine my glee to find that moralists will be needed in that strange world that even Orwell could not have imagined.
I must admit, however, that I find the the cyber miscreants increasingly a source of extended drama; moreover, i must confess that the language continues to be baffling.