British students are using Indian expertise in information technology to complete their course assignments by posting them on outsourcing websites.
They pay £5 to £50 to complete college assignments
LONDON: British students are using Indian expertise in information technology to complete their course assignments by posting them on outsourcing websites and buying the completed coursework.
Called ‘contract cheating’ in academic circles, lecturers in computing department in universities are in a tizzy since such coursework is of high quality and difficult to detect through normal plagiarism detection software.
The students pay amounts ranging from £5 to £50 for the completed coursework that they then pass off as their own work and gain their degrees. The trend is particularly seen in IT courses, in which students need to write programs.
The students use legitimate websites normally used by business, offering freelance project work or tutorial sites specifically set up for the purpose.
India and Romania are popular destinations where such assignments are completed for a fee. IT professionals bid to complete the assignments and British students who post them then select the lowest bid.
The phenomenon was detected by Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke, lecturers at the Birmingham City University’s Department of Computing. “India is a common one. Businesses are off-shoring their call centres to India so there is a connection,” Lancaster said.
According to Clarke, students are paying for their work to be done by professionals over the web. “Previous research conducted has shown over 12 per cent of postings on a popular website for outsourcing computer contract work were actually bid requests from students looking to attempt contract cheating,” he said.
In their research, Lancaster and Clarke analysed postings on a number of business outsourcing websites over a 20 month period between 2004 and 2006 and found about 1,000 cases of contract cheating.
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