When I was a kid, I once did my school homework on my Commodore 64. I typed it all up using a simple word processing system (that I had coded myself) and then printed to a dot matrix printer.

I handed in my work thinking I was leap years ahead of my class in using the best technology I could lay my hands on. My teacher failed the project and asked me to re-write everything by hand.

I remembered this episode when I read recent news about Australian kids getting into trouble for outsourcing their homework to India. For a while now, most universities have had systems in place to prevent plagiarism in essays. So, if I was writing an essay on the history of Australia and I just lifted most of the text straight from Wikipedia, the automated systems would detect a pattern match and flag up my essay to the markers.

However, with software development it’s much harder to detect plagiarism. If you are a first-year computer science student and asked to write a basic alpha-numeric sort algorithm, you can sweat all night over the keyboard or just post the job on a site such as Rent-A-Coder. A software developer somewhere out there will be willing to write the code and email it to you almost instantly.

Clearly there is almost nothing that can be done to detect this type of cheating. The only option for the university is to include some practical supervised tests in the course, to ensure the students really can perform on their own.

But this brought me to think of another personal example. When a friend of mine was working on his MBA a few years back, he outsourced some of his accounting module to his own accountant (my friend was managing director of a software firm). He was open with his professor about what he had done personally and what he had delegated to his accountant. The professor insisted that he complete the outsourced parts of the module himself, or he would have to fail the project.

My friend protested. Pointing out that in the real world he would never do any complex accountancy, which is why he employs an accountant. It would seem that his MBA was not preparing him for the real world in any way – which given his own business success was not really a problem, more of an observation.

I don’t think we can prevent kids hiring others to do their homework. It’s happened since the first homework project was assigned. We just need to be aware that with project-based sites springing up all over the internet, it’s getting easier to get small tasks done. Courses need to be rethought so the right skills are taught and the testing methods are valid.