outsourcing homework to India

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mr friendly guy
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outsourcing homework to India

Post by mr friendly guy »

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Indian websites do your homework for $2

AUSTRALIAN high school and university students are outsourcing their homework to sweatshops in India, Pakistan and Egypt which provide English essays and maths papers for as little as $2.

Websites such as canadianessays.com, realassignment writing.com and dissertation india.com offer fixed-price tariffs or auction-style services where students put work out to tender and workers, mostly graduates from India and Pakistan, bid to take on the projects.

Schools are powerless to stop cheaters using the outsourcing services because custom-made work cannot usually be detected by plagiarism software.

Matt Barrie, founder of freelancer.com, a website designed to put small businesses in touch with affordable labour in emerging economies, said homework assignments were frequently submitted to his site.

"We get them all the time," he said. "As a lecturer myself, I really don't approve, but kids will be kids - they will always find a way to cheat.


"There are students in India who will give answers for just a few dollars and I have seen maths questions answered for $2 a go."

The Sunday Telegraph tracked down one worker offering his services, graduate Mohammed Ali Khan, 23, of Islamabad, Pakistan.

He is turning out essays and papers for high school and university students, charging $2 per 100 words.

"It's my part-time job," he said. "I get work from all over the world including Australia, the US and the UK.

"I've done many jobs for Australian students," he said. "Australians mainly ask for university papers but I've done some high-school work, too."

When asked how much he would charge for a 1000-word Year 12 English language essay, he said $US10.

Academics are concerned about the new customised cheating factories on the net.

"We take this very seriously but, sadly, it's no surprise," University of Western Sydney associate dean Craig Ellis said.

"In the past five years there's been an explosion in sites where you can download pre-written assignments, but we have the mechanisms that allow us to cross-reference essays to identify this. But the trend towards custom-produced work at such low costs is particularly worrying because it is that much harder to spot."

In Australia, Ozessay.com .au offers high-school papers at $16.79 per page with a two-month deadline, rising to $54 per page for PhD-standard work with a 24-hour deadline.

It claims it is now working on essays and dissertations for 1000 Australian students.

The NSW Department of Education warned that any students caught cheating would be given zero marks.

"The Department emphasises to students the importance of the ethical use of technology both in and out of school," a spokesman said.

"Parents have a responsibility to monitor their children's computer use while at home."
Now I have a confession to make. In high school I sold outsourced my maths answers for a minor assignment to other kids who weren't as smart. :D That being said they can churn out PhD level assignments. Fuck thats amazing.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Sarevok »

Now I have a confession to make. In high school I sold outsourced my maths answers for a minor assignment to other kids who weren't as smart. :D That being said they can churn out PhD level assignments. Fuck thats amazing.
Why should it be surprising ? :P

University students in India these days often follow similar course curriculum as in US. They also face very competitive environments. Due to the economic situation university life makes or breaks a persons future in India. So its no wonder they got plenty of talented people you could outsource almost any university assignment to for suitable amount of money.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Simon_Jester »

India has a huge potential talent pool and a relatively small higher-education system. The competition is really fierce, and sheer statistics means there are going to be plenty of impressively educated Indian grad students savvy enough about the exchange rate to agree to something like this.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by PLR2 »

If it wasn't horribly unethical I would totally "outsource" homework that I don't have enough time to do really well because of other assignments or life distractions. And I'll echo that it is fucking amazing that they churn out PhD level work.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Alyeska »

I had one teacher who had a simple requirement. Each essay had to be submitted with first draft and final submission. And she was prepared to compare writing style between essay's. So unless you have the same person writing every paper and always provides a rough draft, your in a spot of hurt.

Its possible to stop most cheaters of this sort, but it requires some effort.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by General Zod »

My psych teacher was mentioning websites like this earlier today in class. It's too bad something like this seems to be a lot harder to catch than standard plagiarism.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

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Oh, wonderful. Now they're going to place even more emphasis on fucking worthless exams, I bet.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by aerius »

Ryan Thunder wrote:Oh, wonderful. Now they're going to place even more emphasis on fucking worthless exams, I bet.
Good. Other than the term papers, most of the written assignments in University are bullshit make-work projects anyway. And seeing how I had several final exams which were worth 100% of the course grade, you can guess how much sympathy I have for people who whine about exams.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by The Duchess of Zeon »

Yeah, I'd like it if I just had 5 exams worth 15% a semester followed by a final worth 25%, and no quizzes, no graded homework, etc, none of that makework that it basically is.... Students should be expected to study enough of the homework problems in the book to pass the tests. Obviously you need projects in various majors which must be in addition to that, but as many classes as possible should strive for such a format.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Archaic` »

So you may say, but industry and government are driving us at the universities (at least here in Aus) to give you assignments, in particular group assignments, as they feel it gives you more of a "real world" grounding for the kind of work you'll be doing once you graduate.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Stark »

The problem of cheating in AU universities is so bad that they simply don't talk about it, especially among international students. I also wrote papers for people back when I was an undergrad, but since I made no effort to match writing styles it should have been very easy to spot.

Except who's got time to play detective? Need to pass more students to make money!
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Phantasee »

Archaic` wrote:So you may say, but industry and government are driving us at the universities (at least here in Aus) to give you assignments, in particular group assignments, as they feel it gives you more of a "real world" grounding for the kind of work you'll be doing once you graduate.
Ugh. Fucking group projects. I take one semester off, come back, and every class has a group project.

At least it helps you figure out who makes a good study buddy and who you should watch out for during the final.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Chris OFarrell »

When I was doing my degree, my university (especially for courses which focused a lot/exclusively on programing assignments) had a policy that the final exam was generally worth 50/60% of the entire mark for the subject. And you HAD to pass said exam to get anything more then a conceded pass in that subject. As in if you got between 40-50% on the final exam, there was a whole formula that would mean you had a very narrow chance to get a conceded pass in some subjects (~45%) but most of the time, you just failed the course. Otherwise if you got 50% or better on the final exam, your final mark was simply exam + assignments.

A lot of these exams were highly artificial, especially in terms of writing programs by pen and paper and/or stuff about programing, but it DID tend to fuck over those people who simply sent their programing assignments to various coding websites and services, because if you DID do the work on your assignments, you'd generally be fine for the exam. And if you didn't, you'd be fucked.

There was, in my second year subjects where they really started this in earnest, more then one person who mysteriously got 40/40 for all the assignments, but got 19/60 for the final exam, and later were proved to have been 'outsourcing' all their assignments, something that everyone 'knew' in the class anyway.

And in a later subject, I had an awesome lecturer who actually knew the main sites people used, checking them out and springing 3 guys who posted their assignment, paid for it and then handed it in. Automatic fail of the entire subject, although they somehow managed to not be excluded from the University itself.


And all the lecturers and subject coordinators agreed freely that the exams were highly artificial, but thats life...
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Liberty »

aerius wrote:
Ryan Thunder wrote:Oh, wonderful. Now they're going to place even more emphasis on fucking worthless exams, I bet.
Good. Other than the term papers, most of the written assignments in University are bullshit make-work projects anyway. And seeing how I had several final exams which were worth 100% of the course grade, you can guess how much sympathy I have for people who whine about exams.
I'm guessing you're in the hard sciences. In history, there are NO exams at all at the graduate level, and many higher level undergraduate courses also do not have exams. Papers are critical. After all, the point of history is not to regurgitate facts, it's to explain and weave things together. From what I have seen, writing is the single most important skill for a historian to have.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Stofsk »

Well, for general humanities I would add. But here exams for Arts courses are rare. Instead assessment is concerned with writing essays and conducting research.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

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The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Yeah, I'd like it if I just had 5 exams worth 15% a semester followed by a final worth 25%, and no quizzes, no graded homework, etc, none of that makework that it basically is.... Students should be expected to study enough of the homework problems in the book to pass the tests. Obviously you need projects in various majors which must be in addition to that, but as many classes as possible should strive for such a format.
From the physics background, homework is essential, because you can take time on it.

There are a lot of very interesting and useful physics problems that teach students good things... but that you can't expect them to solve in under an hour.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Dalton »

Hah. It's really hard to cheat when your final exam is a tv production. Maybe hire a Bollywood director and disguise him.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Archaic` »

Stark wrote:The problem of cheating in AU universities is so bad that they simply don't talk about it, especially among international students.
I don't think the problem's quite that bad, or at least it doesn't seem to be in my fields (Marketing, International Business, Management). Partly just because the assignments handed in by so many international students are so laughably bad that I have a hard time believing that they would've paid for it. Actually, if cheating were really that bad, I'd be grading papers a lot better than I am usually. I'm lucky to give out even one 7 grade in a class of 30.
Stark wrote:I also wrote papers for people back when I was an undergrad, but since I made no effort to match writing styles it should have been very easy to spot.
Surprisingly unlikely. It's a rare assignment that will all be marked by one person. Generally, they'll be distributed amongst all the tutors plus the lecturers (giving each a mix of students from each class, and avoiding giving them their own classes when the numbers are high enough to allow it). There's no reasonable way every paper can be compared to every other paper that way. It's only if one of the papers comes up in the group of "model" papers selected for moderation to ensure roughly equivalent marking standards were kept that it might get noticed. Otherwise...your papers were all likely marked by different people, even if you were all in the same class for the same subject.
Stark wrote:Except who's got time to play detective? Need to pass more students to make money!
Actually, the uni's get more money if they fail, since then (assuming it's a required subject) they have to pay again to repeat the subject later.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Kyler »

Outsourcing cheating doesn't surprise me at all. Though professors in college are getting constantly better technology to help stop cheating.
I went to small state university, and cheating definitely was a problem. A couple of professors did talk about some of their tools including websites and software programs that broke down papers and compared them to written material found threw search engines. So if a student copied websites or academic journals that were posted online they could find it.

I took and English Lit class, and my Professor taught 2 other class with some 70 students overall. We were assigned a topic and required to turn in a rough draft. I was one of only 3 students in all three classes that wasn't required to resubmit their paper because either it wasn't done in the right format or there was cheating. In the end, the English Chair only let her fail three students out of 60 that were caught cheating because they copied entire papers directly from kind of source material.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

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Liberty wrote:
aerius wrote:
Ryan Thunder wrote:Oh, wonderful. Now they're going to place even more emphasis on fucking worthless exams, I bet.
Good. Other than the term papers, most of the written assignments in University are bullshit make-work projects anyway. And seeing how I had several final exams which were worth 100% of the course grade, you can guess how much sympathy I have for people who whine about exams.
I'm guessing you're in the hard sciences. In history, there are NO exams at all at the graduate level, and many higher level undergraduate courses also do not have exams. Papers are critical. After all, the point of history is not to regurgitate facts, it's to explain and weave things together. From what I have seen, writing is the single most important skill for a historian to have.
I'm guessing he's one of those chuckleheads who believes that exams actually test your knowledge of a subject rather than your ability to regurgitate snippets of information in an arbitrarily-chosen time period.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

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Ryan Thunder wrote:I'm guessing he's one of those chuckleheads who believes that exams actually test your knowledge of a subject rather than your ability to regurgitate snippets of information in an arbitrarily-chosen time period.
Mine do.

Don't overgeneralize, Ryan.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

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Simon_Jester wrote:
Ryan Thunder wrote:I'm guessing he's one of those chuckleheads who believes that exams actually test your knowledge of a subject rather than your ability to regurgitate snippets of information in an arbitrarily-chosen time period.
Mine do.

Don't overgeneralize, Ryan.
Well, okay. What field are you in, where that isn't true?

My boss is never going to come over to my desk and say "Write a program to do xyz on a sheet of paper without any references in 15 minutes it must work perfectly with no debugging lol" and breathe down my neck with a pink slip in hand while he waits. That's just a recipe for shitty, unchecked code.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Marcus Aurelius »

Ryan Thunder wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
Ryan Thunder wrote:I'm guessing he's one of those chuckleheads who believes that exams actually test your knowledge of a subject rather than your ability to regurgitate snippets of information in an arbitrarily-chosen time period.
Mine do.

Don't overgeneralize, Ryan.
Well, okay. What field are you in, where that isn't true?

My boss is never going to come over to my desk and say "Write a program to do xyz on a sheet of paper without any references in 15 minutes it must work perfectly with no debugging lol" and breathe down my neck with a pink slip in hand while he waits. That's just a recipe for shitty, unchecked code.
I suppose Simon means physics, but the same would apply to all sciences and many fields of engineering if done right. Unfortunately professors tend to be lazy sometimes, which means that not every exam is going to test your ability apply the knowledge in a meaningful way. So, I think you are both right to a certain degree.

Even in computer science you could test the conceptual understanding of a person without actually demanding her to write a bug free program without references or debugging. You could test if the person has a right idea how to make the program work and just disregard the inevitable bugs as long as the program does the job in theory. Of course checking and grading it would then be much more time consuming and possibly a bit more subjective, which is why it isn't usually done, but it's certainly possible in principle.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by Alyrium Denryle »

Ryan Thunder wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
Ryan Thunder wrote:I'm guessing he's one of those chuckleheads who believes that exams actually test your knowledge of a subject rather than your ability to regurgitate snippets of information in an arbitrarily-chosen time period.
Mine do.

Don't overgeneralize, Ryan.
Well, okay. What field are you in, where that isn't true?

My boss is never going to come over to my desk and say "Write a program to do xyz on a sheet of paper without any references in 15 minutes it must work perfectly with no debugging lol" and breathe down my neck with a pink slip in hand while he waits. That's just a recipe for shitty, unchecked code.
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Re: outsourcing homework to India

Post by RedImperator »

That's fine for hard sciences, but if we're going to at least pretend that undergraduate level social sciences and humanities programs are something besides a $100,000 sleep-away camp for future paper-shufflers, students in those disciplines need to prove they can research, think critically, and write well enough to produce a college-level research paper. So if it turns out those papers are being written in Bangalore, that's a fucking problem.

The only way around it that I can see is what Alyeska suggested: demand to see earlier work, like drafts and notes. That's pretty routine in high school, but I fucking hate the idea of having to do it in college. On the other hand, from what I hear, most incoming college froshies don't know how to write a research paper anyway, so maybe they need to be led step-by-step through the process. It would have driven me nuts, on account of the fact my high school actually had a writing program, but that was before NCLB, so who knows what's become of it.
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