Have you helped a cheat?

[BrilloPad]

You can always tell when the student hasn't written the code.

It'll have error checking in it...

What is the punishment for cheating? Being eaten?

[lilelvis2000]

So they've become more sophisticated than the straightout - "I see your're a C++ expert. How would you do XXX and can you send me the code."

I use to get those all the time.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Hmmmm I don't think anyone would get far with "help" from my tech skills, but that article has given me an idea about where I might be able to get a bit of help myself.....

[NickFitz]

“Activities like this can only have a detrimental effect on the honest IT professionals.”

Nobody on this board then

[BrilloPad]

http://www.contractoruk.com/news/003853.html

Rising number of IT contract cheats

A growing number of students are cheating their way to degrees in computing by paying IT professionals to complete their coursework over the internet.

Out of all the assignments on freelance job sites like Rent a Coder.com, 12% were thought to be from students paying to make the grade with someone else’s skills.

But yesterday, the academic who first labelled such “academic fraud” as “contract cheating,” said both the number of sites and the ‘first time offenders’ they attract have soared.

He told CUK that freelance coders who knowingly bid for and accept student work are “aiding and abetting fraud” by helping qualifications go to those without the necessary skills.

“An employer told me about a student who had only a basic knowledge of SQL, but had got a final year qualification in it,” said Robert Clarke of Birmingham City University’s Department of Computing, which studied 5,000 suspected cheats.

“Some … post work which is a mixture of assignments and commercial work. This indicates that they are carrying on their ‘contract cheating’ activities after graduation”.

A previous probe shows students are generally satisfied with the returned work for being good enough to pass without detection from tutors or anti-plagiarism software.

But Clarke’s study found the quality of work done on their behalf, carried out by the lowest bidder, tends to be “poor” and therefore may give freelance IT work a bad name.

“There are several issues that relate to the use of IT contactors to assist in this form of academic dishonesty,” he said.

“The students may be ‘satisfied’ and give a good rating to the coder, but it begs the question what level of service do they [the websites] provide to legitimate buyers?

“The students are unlikely to complain, but these issues could tarnish the reputation of this important way of linking buyers with IT professionals.”

In the research, some of the IT professionals who won student contracts subcontracted out their new assignment, sometimes via the same auction site.

With prices per project ranging from £5to £50, the need to payout a second fee would typically see coders in the UK enlist help from coders in low-cost labour markets.

India and Romania were the top locations for cut-price IT skills, the former being the most popular thanks to its army of cheap and English-speaking techies.

Clarke said contract cheating can lead to a breach of both copyright, as work can be directly lifted from other sites, and personal, as well as commercial, data security.

In one case, he found a hospital worker in California was inviting bids for IT tasks from their Masters degree, alongside a sensitive database project, which included patients’ medical records..

“What would be the reaction of the employers if they knew that their work was being outsourced without their knowledge and approval?” Mr Clarke asked.

“There have [also] been a few occasions where we have spotted attempts by others to gain an unfair advantage by getting someone to do a pre-selection IT skills test for them, or to cheat on Microsoft qualification.

“Activities like this can only have a detrimental effect on the honest IT professionals.”