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January 20, 2006
Psssst! Wanna buy some answers?
Wednesday's Wall Street Journal reported that college students now have the option of outsourcing their homework -- in some fields, like programming, it's easy to hire someone to write a program for you, for an assignment in a programming class:
The computer-programming student who goes by the handle "Lover Of Nightlife" did last month, as the fall semester raced to a close, could only have happened in the age of the Internet: He went online to outsource his predicament.
"This is homework I did not have time to study for," he said in a message on a Web site devoted to outsourcing computer projects. "I need you guys to help me."
Attached was a take-home final exam for a computer class that Mr. Nightlife Lover wanted to pay someone else -- presumably, someone from a place where people can't afford a lot of night life to begin with -- to take for him.
"This bit of commerce took place on Rentacoder.com, a Web site that has been mentioned before in this column as an example of globalization in all its blood-curdling efficiency. Rent A Coder enables people -- usually Americans -- who need computer programs to put them out to bid -- usually for cut-throat prices by Indians and Eastern Europeans." This is from Lee Gomes's "Portals" column.
Meanwhile, there appears to be a black market in textbook answer keys as well. Although some textbook publishers readily make available their solution manuals for student use, some are much cagier about it. As a result, there are people on eBay who are willing to sell electronic copies of the manuals (where they got them is anyone's guess).
It should be no surprise that there are plenty of places to buy old term papers -- and, in response, sites like turnitin.com, which are designed to help professors catch plagiarists. But the black-market solutions manuals are a new one on me. (I should note here that none of my accounting instructors grades homework on correctness -- some of them check to make sure you've done it and give you a few points on your semester grade for doing so, but they don't care if you've got the right answers or not; just that you've sat down and done the work. And in certain particularly tough classes, it's a good idea to go beyond doing the assigned homework and do as many problems as possible -- ideally, every problem in the book. In such a situation, an answer key would -- speaking hypothetically -- be useful for checking your own work to see if you're on the right track. But that would involve actually purchasing the item to find out for sure if it's real....)
Posted by Urbie at January 20, 2006 04:02 PM