Australian students outsource coursework to India

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Melbourne, July 4: : Australian computer science students are reportedly outsourcing their courseworks to cheap programmers in countries like India.

University students here are hiring cheap programmers for their assignments which are put out to tender on the internet sites and coders bid to complete them.

And students are paying anywhere from under 100 Australian dollars to several hundred dollars, depending on the amount of work required, The Age said.

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.

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," David Wilson, associate dean of teaching and learning for information technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, said.

"We're aware that it happens and we're catching some people but I think that's the tip of the iceberg," he added.

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 can 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," Compton said, adding "If the coder provides the same solution to a few students we'll catch them via the plagiarism detection but if they provide it to only 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.

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

"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," Compton added.