from ottawa citizen, getacoder.com 2006/9
http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=7b986c6c-68bf-4dd4-b257-0424e0ef8ccd
bids from people in Germany, Uruguay, Pakistan and Ukraine, paying anywhere from $20 to $120 U.S. for the finished work.
That the above essay bid was posted in San Francisco and won by a bidder in Lahore, Pakistan, for just $10 is the perfect example of why these websites are successful. That, in turn, is necessary to understand how students have been using these sites to cheat.
The websites' statistics bear out the realities even further. According to Rent A Coder, 19 per cent of contractors who did work on the site last month came from India, taking on 1,291 jobs. They were followed by Romania at 16 per cent; the United States at 14 per cent; Pakistan at six per cent; and Ukraine and Russia at four per cent. Canada came eighth at three per cent and 223 jobs.
A look at which countries post the most work confirms the outsourcing effect: buyers in the U.S. accounted for 57 per cent (3,865) of last month's projects. Britain came next at 12 per cent, followed by Australia and Canada at six per cent each. India appears on the list in sixth place at only two per cent.
Shawn Simister and Devin Steffler have both taken on programming projects through Rent A Coder. They've also, to varying degrees, done someone else's homework through the site. But they might be considered the exceptions to the outsourcing rule: they don't live in India or Pakistan; they live in Ottawa.
Mr. Simister, 24 and a fifth-year computer-science student at Carleton University, and Mr. Steffler, also 24 and a Carleton software-engineering graduate now doing contract work, both found Rent A Coder through Google searches for programming projects. Rent A Coder's opportunities quickly attracted them: here was a chance to not only hone their programming skills, but also make some cash.
"I'm interested in programming, then I saw that other people were interested but getting paid," said Mr. Simister. "I guess that's the power of the Internet."
Mr. Simister logged on to Rent A Coder in 2002, Mr. Steffler just last April. But they couldn't immediately win the big-money projects they sought, mainly because the site's ranking system — which lets buyers rate a contractor after the work is finished — meant that inexperienced bidders would almost always lose to more seasoned ones.
For many people who end up supplying homework, this seems to be the turning point that spurs them to bid on such postings.
Mr. Simister and Mr. Steffler looked first for small projects, which, if they delivered, would bring them high ratings. Those ratings would boost their chances of winning the projects for which they originally signed on.
They found that small-value work in the steady stream of homework being put up for bids. Mr. Simister started going to the clearly marked "Homework Help" section of the website. He likened it to the tutoring he did at Carleton, only this time he was doing it online.
"People that had a problem with a (computer) program that wouldn't work, I would take a look at it, fix it for them," ha said, adding that he did a "handful" of homework projects.
He earned anywhere from $10 to $40 for each project, most of which typically took an hour or two and came from the U.S. There came a point, he admits, when the ethics of what he was doing began to gnaw at him.
"It was a bit of a question for me," he said. "On the one hand, I love helping people. On the other hand, I don't want to help someone cheat and get a degree they don't deserve."
Mr. Steffler, meanwhile, never really asked himself those questions. Cheating, in one form or another, was happening in his program, he said, whether it was in the friends who followed one another into the bathroom during an exam to compare answers, or the student who acquired a previous year's test.
Mr. Steffler's frustration boiled over, he said, when he wrote a professor complaining about a student using the previous year's test, only to have his professor insinuate the other student was smarter. So when it came to doing someone's homework to build up his website ranking, Mr. Steffler had few qualms.
"I figured someone's going to do it anyways, and I needed some positive feedback, so why not?" he said. "I didn't feel bad about it at all because I've seen (cheating) so many times anyways, whether it went through a website or not."
Mr. Steffler took on two homework projects about three weeks after signing on to Rent A Coder, earning a total of $25. Both students rated him a 10, getting him the ranking boost he needed. But he quickly soured on Rent A Coder. It became impossible, he said, to outbid people who could more easily afford to keep dropping the price.
"The majority of the projects on there ... are really small projects that someone wants anyone to do at the cheapest price, and all those prices would go to someone in India or Romania or whatever," he said.
When the Citizen arranged to have a university essay written through Rent A Coder, 11 of the 18 contractors who expressed interest had been rated four times or fewer by previous buyers, with some admitting they were bidding in hopes of getting a strong ranking to add to their credentials.
Several of the contractors from India and Serbia who bid on the essay said they had heard of Rent A Coder through friends. One had read about it in a Times of India profile of the site headlined "India's invisible billion-dollar economy." Some were students using the money to fund their studies, while others ran teams of people whose income depended on winning bids of all types.
Last year, more than 100,000 projects were completed through the Elance site, bringing in revenue of $18 million. The company expects to surpass that total in this, its seventh year.
Elance has more than 823,000 registered users, about 30,000 of them Canadian. An average of 1,800 projects are posted weekly, with the company netting 8.75 per cent of each winning bid as its commission.
Rent A Coder, meanwhile, has no plans for a similar ban. One of the most popular freelance programming sites on the Internet, Rent A Coder has grown from its launch in 2001 to a destination that now gets about 3.7 million page views each month.
When asked how he would justify making money off academic fraud (Rent A Coder takes a 15-per-cent commission from each winning bid), Mr. Ippolito wrote: "I can't justify allocating scarce resources from other/real problems to ineffectively police it. If those people want to short change themselves that is their decision ... they are only cheating themselves when they can't pass the exam. It's a self-victimizing 'crime.' "
GetACoder, which did not return requests for interviews or comments, earns its keep by charging buyers $3 for each winning bid and taking a 10-per-cent commission.
bids from people in Germany, Uruguay, Pakistan and Ukraine, paying anywhere from $20 to $120 U.S. for the finished work.
That the above essay bid was posted in San Francisco and won by a bidder in Lahore, Pakistan, for just $10 is the perfect example of why these websites are successful. That, in turn, is necessary to understand how students have been using these sites to cheat.
The websites' statistics bear out the realities even further. According to Rent A Coder, 19 per cent of contractors who did work on the site last month came from India, taking on 1,291 jobs. They were followed by Romania at 16 per cent; the United States at 14 per cent; Pakistan at six per cent; and Ukraine and Russia at four per cent. Canada came eighth at three per cent and 223 jobs.
A look at which countries post the most work confirms the outsourcing effect: buyers in the U.S. accounted for 57 per cent (3,865) of last month's projects. Britain came next at 12 per cent, followed by Australia and Canada at six per cent each. India appears on the list in sixth place at only two per cent.
Shawn Simister and Devin Steffler have both taken on programming projects through Rent A Coder. They've also, to varying degrees, done someone else's homework through the site. But they might be considered the exceptions to the outsourcing rule: they don't live in India or Pakistan; they live in Ottawa.
Mr. Simister, 24 and a fifth-year computer-science student at Carleton University, and Mr. Steffler, also 24 and a Carleton software-engineering graduate now doing contract work, both found Rent A Coder through Google searches for programming projects. Rent A Coder's opportunities quickly attracted them: here was a chance to not only hone their programming skills, but also make some cash.
"I'm interested in programming, then I saw that other people were interested but getting paid," said Mr. Simister. "I guess that's the power of the Internet."
Mr. Simister logged on to Rent A Coder in 2002, Mr. Steffler just last April. But they couldn't immediately win the big-money projects they sought, mainly because the site's ranking system — which lets buyers rate a contractor after the work is finished — meant that inexperienced bidders would almost always lose to more seasoned ones.
For many people who end up supplying homework, this seems to be the turning point that spurs them to bid on such postings.
Mr. Simister and Mr. Steffler looked first for small projects, which, if they delivered, would bring them high ratings. Those ratings would boost their chances of winning the projects for which they originally signed on.
They found that small-value work in the steady stream of homework being put up for bids. Mr. Simister started going to the clearly marked "Homework Help" section of the website. He likened it to the tutoring he did at Carleton, only this time he was doing it online.
"People that had a problem with a (computer) program that wouldn't work, I would take a look at it, fix it for them," ha said, adding that he did a "handful" of homework projects.
He earned anywhere from $10 to $40 for each project, most of which typically took an hour or two and came from the U.S. There came a point, he admits, when the ethics of what he was doing began to gnaw at him.
"It was a bit of a question for me," he said. "On the one hand, I love helping people. On the other hand, I don't want to help someone cheat and get a degree they don't deserve."
Mr. Steffler, meanwhile, never really asked himself those questions. Cheating, in one form or another, was happening in his program, he said, whether it was in the friends who followed one another into the bathroom during an exam to compare answers, or the student who acquired a previous year's test.
Mr. Steffler's frustration boiled over, he said, when he wrote a professor complaining about a student using the previous year's test, only to have his professor insinuate the other student was smarter. So when it came to doing someone's homework to build up his website ranking, Mr. Steffler had few qualms.
"I figured someone's going to do it anyways, and I needed some positive feedback, so why not?" he said. "I didn't feel bad about it at all because I've seen (cheating) so many times anyways, whether it went through a website or not."
Mr. Steffler took on two homework projects about three weeks after signing on to Rent A Coder, earning a total of $25. Both students rated him a 10, getting him the ranking boost he needed. But he quickly soured on Rent A Coder. It became impossible, he said, to outbid people who could more easily afford to keep dropping the price.
"The majority of the projects on there ... are really small projects that someone wants anyone to do at the cheapest price, and all those prices would go to someone in India or Romania or whatever," he said.
When the Citizen arranged to have a university essay written through Rent A Coder, 11 of the 18 contractors who expressed interest had been rated four times or fewer by previous buyers, with some admitting they were bidding in hopes of getting a strong ranking to add to their credentials.
Several of the contractors from India and Serbia who bid on the essay said they had heard of Rent A Coder through friends. One had read about it in a Times of India profile of the site headlined "India's invisible billion-dollar economy." Some were students using the money to fund their studies, while others ran teams of people whose income depended on winning bids of all types.
Last year, more than 100,000 projects were completed through the Elance site, bringing in revenue of $18 million. The company expects to surpass that total in this, its seventh year.
Elance has more than 823,000 registered users, about 30,000 of them Canadian. An average of 1,800 projects are posted weekly, with the company netting 8.75 per cent of each winning bid as its commission.
Rent A Coder, meanwhile, has no plans for a similar ban. One of the most popular freelance programming sites on the Internet, Rent A Coder has grown from its launch in 2001 to a destination that now gets about 3.7 million page views each month.
When asked how he would justify making money off academic fraud (Rent A Coder takes a 15-per-cent commission from each winning bid), Mr. Ippolito wrote: "I can't justify allocating scarce resources from other/real problems to ineffectively police it. If those people want to short change themselves that is their decision ... they are only cheating themselves when they can't pass the exam. It's a self-victimizing 'crime.' "
GetACoder, which did not return requests for interviews or comments, earns its keep by charging buyers $3 for each winning bid and taking a 10-per-cent commission.
posted by kan chun at 5:51 PM
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