UK students outsource IT coursework to India

UK IT students are hiring coders in India to complete their coursework for as little as £5 a go. A-level and university pupils are logging onto computer coding websites and farming out their work to foreign IT graduates.

Academics at Birmingham City University have detected 1,000 students cheating worldwide since they began monitoring the websites in 2004.

The majority of these students are studying an IT-related course and about one third are from the UK. Students contract their work to the lowest bidder, with prices ranging from £5 for simple undergraduate coursework, to £100 for postgraduate dissertations.

Birmingham City computing lecturer Thomas Lancaster said the practice is spreading as more websites spring up, particularly in India and Romania, and that it could be more prevalent as it is very difficult to detect.

Lancaster and fellow City lecturer Robert Clarke are calling on the government to set up a national database of university assignments so they can be matched against contract requests on coding websites and traced back to students.