
Doing Western students' homework is big business in Kenya - thereare5lights
https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-24/doing-western-students-homework-big-business-kenya
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backupcavalry
When I was a teaching assistant in university in Singapore here I knew a guy
that ran the same sort of business, albeit for coding assignments instead of
essays. He was making a couple of thousand a month - showed me the bank
records and everything.

I'll admit, only reason why I didn't sign up was because I was already swamped
and sorta lazy - we're talking about like a hundred bucks for something as
trite as the first assignment for CS101. Apparently the most generous clients
were Chinese students with more money than drive.

~~~
throwawa66
Wow, the students have a lot of money! And they arent spending it wisely.
Whats the point of education if somebody else does it for you? Just the
diploma?

~~~
ativzzz
For many people, the degree itself provides more financial value in the long
term than the material the degree teaches.

~~~
throwawa66
Yeah but all those wasted years in school, wasted time for professors, wasted
energy to keep the the school building warm or cold depending on the season,
there must be a more efficient way to do things.. There should be a school
bypass mode for the manager types who need the diploma but aren't interested
in learning anything

~~~
ativzzz
Unfortunately that's not the way human society works.

> There should be a school bypass mode for the manager types

There used to be. These people could start at a company doing unskilled labor
and work their way up to management. But that has pretty much stopped
happening in the past 40-50 years. See this relevant HN post from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231579)

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spodek
> _institutions should focus on learning why students cheat in the first
> place._

The students didn't create the system. I suggest the institutions look into
their pedagogy that motivates cheating with abstract assignments unrelated to
students' lives.

Project-based learning helps solve it.

As a side note, I wouldn't call the Kenyans' work cheating. They didn't enroll
in an institution with an honor code like the students did. They're working
for pay.

~~~
irrational
Eh. I teach introduction to web development at the college level. All of the
assignments are project-based (each week the students build a web page
starting out with just html, then adding css, then adding JS, then AJAX, then
some simple server-side code, etc.).

Yet, cheating is still rampant.

~~~
throwawa66
They are clearly not interested in the subject. Why are they there? Are they
just taking this class because they are pursuing the money in IT or is it peer
pressure? The problem can possibly be solved if the root cause is studied

~~~
ativzzz
> Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are
> pursuing the money

Yes. Having a piece of paper makes you more qualified when competing against
thousands of people. Of course you can do other things to make yourself stand
out by showing off your projects you've worked on, but that's a lot harder
than gaming the system to get good grades.

As it stands now, a college degree is just a qualifier that tells companies
"this person is willing to play the game that current society has established,
and will make a better employee than those that aren't willing"

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bluenose69
It can be easy to spot this kind of thing. I recall a student paper that was
very well written, although almost every paragraph contained a sentence or two
of terribly garbled English. This was a foreign student with weak English
skills, so it was pretty clear that the majority of the paper had been written
or at least edited by someone else who was a skilled writer.

This was not a case of copying something from a source, because I avoid asking
the same question twice, or asking a question for which a websearch can turn
up anything useful.

~~~
russfink
Hold a three question interview with the claimed author. Ensure that only two
questions are based on the paper's claims, eg, So, Professor Newton, is rate
of fall linearly or exponentially related to mass?

~~~
abhishekjha
Wait, it isn't related to mass, right? Or am I forgetting my physics? g is
m/s^2. No mass factor.

~~~
xzcat
That's the joke/trick, it's basically begging the question. You can out a
cheater by asking a question of the form:

Which is true, (A and A->B) or (A and A->C)?

A cheater will fret over whether B or C is true, while someone who did the
work will probably immediately identify that A is false and that the question
is misleadingly worded.

~~~
2zcon
It takes a very low false-positive rate before most of the people you're
catching are just nervous, not cheaters.

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unlimit
I have heard it is big business in India as well.

People from US/UK also outsource their day jobs too. I used to know a guy who
bought a flat doing this in India and also got invited to his client's
wedding. :-)

~~~
badpun
What kind of job requires so little human interaction to be outsourceable
without anyone noticing?

~~~
username90
100% remote jobs.

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chrisseaton
> has completed ... PhD dissertations

How can that possibly work?

You don't just go away and write a PhD dissertation in isolation, it grows
slowly over three or more years with intimate private discussion with your
advisor, and intermediate peer-reviewed publications that you have to present
and defend in-person.

I can't understand how you could conceivably out-source that to someone else?

~~~
trevyn
Same as how middle managers can explain work product to their superiors --
they didn't personally create it, but they have grown familiar over time as an
intermediary.

~~~
chrisseaton
I still don't get how that would work. When your advisor asks you in person
how you think some technique that they've only just explained to you applies
to your work, what do you do? Text your Kenyan ghost-writer under the table?

~~~
Double_a_92
"Hmm... Yes.. Sounds interesting, I'll see if I can apply that to my work.
Thank your for your valuable input."

Also you probably still have _some_ idea of what is going on. You still had to
pass all your in-person exams in your academic career so far.

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lopmotr
Imagine if cheating rates for each university were somehow measured and
published independently so that a cheat rank was as well known as the usual
rankings. Then, to avoid a poor ranking, universities would have to pay their
staff to actually assess their students instead of taking the shortcuts they
are.

~~~
mkl
Actually assessing students [1] won't usually help with this kind of thing.
Well-ghostwritten assignments can be pretty hard to detect.

[1] Not sure what you mean by that, as actual assessment is already
universally happening IME.

~~~
pathsjs
Actually assessing students could mean, you know, testing them orally instead
of handing them assignments. Or at least letting them have a written exam in
front of you.

~~~
bluenose69
This is true. The best scheme is the formal written exam, because oral exams
can have issues with bias.

Assignments can be useful for learning, as a way to keep students on-track. In
my undergraduate days, assignments were optional, and scores on them were
ignored if the exam had a higher score. That struck me as a good approach, but
nowadays I think it would lead professors to create easy final exams, to avoid
the low scores that lead to student complaints and problems at tenure time.

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nateburke
Job Requirements:

\- research and vet outsourced service providers

\- manage multiple outsourced projects concurrently

\- effectively present project outputs to stakeholders

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tr33house
Kenya is a very undervalued country... Lots of highly educated folks. Too bad
poverty and a lack of opportunities causes people to aid in cheating

~~~
qwerty456127
Why is there poverty and lack of opportunities if there are lots of highly
educated folks? I always believed education is the key to prosperity of a
nation.

~~~
pjc50
There's poverty because there isn't enough income, and there's lack of
opportunity because there isn't enough capital? Education isn't magic and
cannot substitute for a lack of money, and it only flourishes in a peaceful
society with strong civic institutions.

Kenya was hit fairly hard by British colonialism, then (as so often) was a
one-party state under a strongman for a long time, and is now dealing with a
small Islamist insurgency. It's in the middle rank of African countries; it
doesn't have the resource wealth of Nigeria, Angola or South Africa, but it's
not a violent basket case like Somalia or Eritrea.

~~~
qwerty456127
> There's poverty because there isn't enough income, and there's lack of
> opportunity because there isn't enough capital? Education isn't magic and
> cannot substitute for a lack of money

Why does it even matter where the money is today? Why can't they just provide
their services over the Internet to get the money? They are doing this already
as this very post suggests and should expand to other fields, less
questionable fields in particular.

> it doesn't have the resource wealth of Nigeria, Angola or South Africa

Doesn't it? I suspect almost every country (in Africa especially) has a wealth
of some resource, they just don't know it's there and don't have the
technology to mine it. Perhaps the smart educated folks may discover it
occasionally.

~~~
socialdemocrat
> Doesn't it? I suspect almost every country (in Africa especially) has a
> wealth of some resource, they just don't know it's there and don't have the
> technology to mine it. Perhaps the smart educated folks may discover it
> occasionally.

The problem is quality government. I live in Norway which is big on resources
too and work with people who are geologists and do surveying. Norway is
insanely expensive to do mining compared to Africa in terms of labor costs,
environmental protection laws etc.

However many mining companies would still pick Norway over Africa. Why? Very
stable high quality government. Mining requires large investments for years.
You don't want to lose those investments because of civil war, or some
dictator takes power, or a populists nationalize mine without compensation.

And even if an African country gets a mine, they run the risk of it not
helping the country develop much. Because:

1) A western company may extract most of the wealth. In principle that could
happen in Norway too, but Norwegian government will tax these companies far
more. A western company can often squeeze poor African governments to get very
low tax deals. Or they simply bribe officials.

2) Government corruption. There may be a lot of wealth, but it may end up in
the pockets of corrupt officials who use it to buy foreign luxury products
hence it benefits the local economy very little.

My point is that developing a country is a very complex task, because they
tend to have a whole cocktail of problems that reinforce each other.

Often many approaches to solving these problems make matters worse. Zero
tolerance towards corruption e.g. tends to make things worse. That allows
corruption charges to be used selectively to imprison political opponents.

~~~
qwerty456127
> There may be a lot of wealth, but it may end up in the pockets of corrupt
> officials who use it to buy foreign luxury products

That's what came into my mind an hour ago: it probably is easy to inhibit
corruption in developing countries if every developed country would ban their
citizens from purchasing luxury and making huge investments abroad. E.g. if a
Kenyan or a Russian citizen (let alone an official/politician) wants to buy a
humble middle-class living or start a small business in the EU/US/UK/etc -
that's Ok but as soon as they try to buy a luxury penthouse, a castle or
otherwise invest money which exceeds their country richest city median annual
wage by an order or magnitude or more - this transaction should be blocked and
investigated.

~~~
pjc50
That's a bit "run before you can walk"; most places are only just putting in
the required beneficial owner rules in order to know that an e.g. Cayman
Islands limited company isn't a front for someone on the US proscribed persons
list, let alone that they're taking bribes in Kenya.

There is a tremendous paper that takes advantage of the fact that a lot of
debt is public in its _amount_ but not owners to quantify the "missing
trillions". The global sums of "amount owed to me" and "amount owed by me"
should sum to zero, but there's a huge gap. That's money owed (bonds) to the
invisible rich.

[https://theintercept.com/2016/04/05/heres-the-price-
countrie...](https://theintercept.com/2016/04/05/heres-the-price-countries-
pay-for-tax-evasion-exposed-in-panama-papers/)

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drpgq
Kind of supportive of Bryan Caplan's idea of education as signaling.

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hyperpallium
Those who do the work (in Kenya) get the education, whie those who pay
(Western students) don't.

If education is worthwhile, the scales of merit will eventualy tip in their
favour. _If_...

~~~
zerr
That reinforces the point that the school in the west is not about education
but networking/nepotism.

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lurcio
There’s a more lucrative thriving non-location based market at degree/PhD
level too (Harvard, etc)

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hyranck
I'm an American and I have done this many times. The money is much better than
the vast majority of other freelance writing jobs, and the work is more
rewarding than pumping out low effort blog spam. Better to just use
craigslist, etc. to find clients in my experience though. I can typically
charge as much, if not more than the paper mill sites, and no one is taking a
cut.

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cproctor
Maybe the final exam should be a closed-book test where each student is given
questions about their own essay.

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throwawa66
Whats the next level of outsourcing? Is the western world slowly corrupting
itself to the lowest level?

