
In India, engineering students outsource their academic projects - kamaal
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/future-engineers-take-easy-way-out-outsource-projects/1011221/
======
kamaal
Actually I posted this article not because I wanted to point out how bad
Indian students are. Not all Indian students do this. And the Indian market is
a usual mix of people of various kinds- Awesome, good, bad, horrible and even
clueless people like this.

What I wanted to point out was how things work out in the real world. The
thumb rule for describing these sort of things in India is the saying 'No good
deed goes unpunished'. You will see most of these students doing these will
actually win over the actual hard working guys. The guy who did the real
project would have probably failed, or wouldn't have enough polish on his
project. Or due to his sheer intelligence, and little touch of arrogance
gotten out of favor of his professors. Due to all this he probably would have
scored less marks, missed out the interview opportunity and then left to
wander for jobs.

The guys who got the project done 'ready made', would have made their project
look complete. Mugged up all the viva and etc questions. Got plenty of time to
study interview books and questions asked in campus interviews. And due to all
this would have easily cleared the already heavily gamed interview process.

So the net story is, if you cheat you are likely to win than if you work hard
the true way.

When I joined the industry I noticed the process manifest in front of my own
eyes. Every joe joining the company wanted to be a manager in 4 years, with a
monthly take home of 1.5L, at least 3-4 foreign travel opportunities. Of
course in highly political environments like large corporates, some played
their old game and got through. But most who didn't had two options

    
    
        a) MBA
        b) MS in the United States.
    

I saw the very people who did all this once again went to tutions, cleared
their GRE/CAT were granted bank loans to go study in the US. Most of them I
know are working today in the US and probably will end up being US citizens.

The actual hard working technical guys(programmers, hackers or whatever you
may call them) are treated like commodity, worst like a foot ball tossed
around by 'business guys', because Indian IT religion creed says 'Being
technical is not important, rather one must do smart work'.

So in the name of smart work, technical career has no growth path, no long
term rewards. In order to grow and get paid well you have to be a 'manager'.
Or worst work at a start up, where you are likely fail, not get compensated
enough, Or if you are too unlucky work for a stingy/unethical founder and burn
your hands then get back to your old MegaCorp back again.

When this is the routine cycle. What do you expect this students to do?

~~~
sliverstorm
_So in the name of smart work, technical career has no growth path_

That doesn't quite make sense. Wouldn't technical work be the "smart" work?

~~~
kamaal
>>Wouldn't technical work be the "smart" work?

Its not very financially rewarding. And when you see the guy next to you
making big bucks by just asking for status updates, forwarding mails and
changing cells on excel sheets. You begin to wonder if its worth it.

~~~
tutysara
>> Its not very financially rewarding. And when you see the guy next to you
making big bucks by just asking for status updates, forwarding mails and
changing cells on excel sheets. You begin to wonder if its worth it.

I had this same question and asked one of the more experienced guy in our team
on why he didn't took the managerial path when he had the chance and
experience - his answer was "This is what I like". I could see that there are
more financially motivated people in the team than there are people who love
technology. If tomorrow the whole IT industry in the country goes extinct most
of the guys who fill in excel sheets will be happy counting boxes in a factory
as long as they pay enough.

------
amitagrawal
I study in one of the largest universities in India. It is also fairly reputed
within the country as well as outside.

During my 2nd year of engineering we had to complete a programming "mini
project". If you're familiar with these you may know the quality of most
projects.

Year after year you can see the same projects reappear, some even to the point
that the old student's details aren't changed in the source code to reflect
the new owner's!

So we had to complete this project by forming a group - minimum of 2 students
and a maximum of 4. The guideline? It should have a UI (duh!) and a database.
The clear instructions from the professor were to use only Visual Basic or
Java. The syllabus booklet obviously mentioned that any suitable language
could be used.

I went to him to ask if it was OK to do a "web based", "database-enabled" &
"User Interfacing" application. To say that he was agitated would be a
euphemism. It was like I had insulted him. To placate him, I respectfully
pointed out that it was perfectly okay for me to use a language that I was
comfortable in and that a web-based project was in fact a norm.

To avenge the dishonor I had brought him, he bullied another member of my
group to leave my group just an hour before the demo to an external professor
(a professor from some other college who is invited for the demo and viva
voce).

Meanwhile the demo went great, the external was very satisfied with the
answers to his questions although I can be sure he was a little happily
surprised that I had coded it myself completely. My professor sitting next to
him was fuming with rage. I gladly left the hall being sure of making it
satisfactorily.

I was dumbfounded when I found it on my report card that I had failed getting
only 10% of the total allotment for the project and the re-hashed project
managed to score 90% and above.

The sad thing is most of my colleagues didn't even try to code or come up with
an idea. Even sadder is the fact that if you do, the professors make sure to
take it personally and pull you down instead of motivating or giving a helping
hand.

~~~
intended
Your prof was a douche. Perhaps he required some special language to get
through to him but you never know.

I know profs who would be more than happy that someone took some initiative.

At the same time the same prof was completely cognizant of how the game was
played.

When I took a course and answered like a sane person, he held his head in his
hands and directed me to a few students who reminded me that a 5 point answer
was a minimum of 1 page of regurgitation.

I had even more fun when I spoke to the bio med students. I remember their
jaws dropping to the ground when I described how I had worked on an
autoclave/run gels and generally had fun running genetic experiments over
summer break.

Their final project? Making ghaghras and perfect pineapple juice - because the
board had decreed that graduates should have some "usable skills once they are
in the real world."

------
yuvipanda
Posting for a friend who wishes to remain anonymous:

I'm a mechanical engineering by education and one thing I have noticed is
there are no such options available for mechanical engineers. I remember
sweating it out at the workshop fabricating a continuous variable transmission
(automatic transmission) unit by hand from scratch.

I went on to work with a "leading education company" in India and we rolled
out an "innovative" program for engineering college students. I was fresh out
of bschool and was mainly involved in preparing the presentations to be
presented to the top management.

The plan was supposed to connect the student community with the industry to
facilitate final year projects for "free". I was happy because this entire
"outsourcing of projects" was always one of my pet peeves. I later found out
that the real plan was to do the above, but do it slowly and when the students
were running out of time, make them pay up and "sell" them a project.

The service didn't take off and boy was I secretly glad!

What did I learn from the exercise?

1\. There is a booming industry to sell projects.

2\. There is immense demand. The moment we started advertising, we got tens of
thousands of calls every day.

3\. The students just want to get done with the projects. Why? They already
have job offers from one of the various software companies and this is just a
formality to get their degree certificate.

4\. They just aren't interested.

5\. We approached engineering colleges as part of marketing and most
directors/principals we met were @$$holes who asked us just one question -
Will this help me get more admissions for the next academic year?

6\. Most HODs wanted a cut out of the entire deal.

7\. Demand for projects (in decreasing order) EC>EE>CS/IT>EI>Mech/Civil

I do not know the solution to this problem, but the entire ecosystem is
flawed.

------
trhtrsh
1\. How much does "project making" pay compared to other available software
jobs?

2\. Are those projects more fun than other jobs?

3\. Subvert the whole system: Create a project-making company. Keep good
records. Refer your employees to employers, on the basis of their solid
project portfolios. Basically, project-making companies thus displace the
universities as the place where real learning happens and is proven.

4\. Thank you to all the Indians posting here today. I feel like I am reading
hackernews.in, and it's nice to get a vacation from Silicon Valley :-)

~~~
jezclaremurugan
1\. 20 - 30 projects a year = 1 yr. inexperienced programmer salary. 2\. Fun -
yes, Interesting - yes => if you can convince students to choose projects on
whatever you want to work on. 3\. Project making companies are dime a dozen.
4\. Most welcome :)

PS - when I was a student I did 2-3 other projects for others...

AND students studying MS in USA and UK also send their assignments/homeworks
back home - did those too ;)

~~~
kamaal
>>AND students studying MS in USA and UK also send their assignments/homeworks
back home - did those too ;)

Actually MS in USA and UK in many(Not all, so please don't frown on me) cases
is really for.

    
    
        a. Foreign degree.
        b. USA return/citizen stamp.
        c. Helps to get dowry in many cases.
    

How many people actually go there to study in the true sense?

~~~
Achshar
I know it won't matter much and you would just have to take my word for it,
but i would _love_ to study in valley, get a masters or something. Although
would come back after education (if I am not selected into YC).

------
sathish316
I despised this trend when I was in college and did not know the value of
internships either. Most people I knew were outsourcing or buying projects or
internship certificates to have more time for what they wanted to do after
college - MBA, MS etc.

Me and my friend knew 8051 assembly language before project frenzy started. We
wanted to stay away from outsourcing project sellers and build something on
our own. There was a senior who'd built a Robotic arm to show it was possible.
Our major was in Electronics and communications engineering. We built a GPS
vehicle locator by making two GSM phones talk to each other using SMS. It even
had a maps front-end in VB.

Nothing I had learnt in College prepared us for what we did in those 3 months.
We took printouts of 8051 microcontroller, GPS module, Nokia, Siemens modem
datasheets. We spent lot of time researching GPS modules which we could get in
Bangalore and after numerous visits to circuit shops, setup a lab at home for
soldering and burning microcontroller ROM. We burned code in 8051 ROM like
200+ times and spent the whole time learning soldering, writing modular code
in Embedded C, talking to Siemens AT modems. When we finally got SMS response
of GPS coordinates, we had 600 lines of Embedded C code. We started writing
the client side in VB which was a breeze except for soldering a Nokia phone to
COM port. We got the same grades as those who bought their projects, but we
had the satisfaction of building something.

College in India is pretty much useless unless you have great peers. I was
fortunate to have a liberal education in school where the focus was on
learning and not rote memorization. I learnt assembly, gwbasic, C, VB while in
school. My friend got a job in Embedded systems industry. I applied for GPS
and fleet mgmt software companies but ended up working for a big IT company. I
got out of that soon and joined a place where developers are not treated like
commodities.

------
gingerjoos
The sorry state of education is a distraction, the real problem is something
else. Most students in India are not given much of a choice when it comes to
choosing their career path. Most of the students are forced to be doctors,
engineers or civil servants. Very few end up being artists, singers, sports-
person... anything which is not a "real" job.

The result being that a host of colleges have sprung up to meet this demand.
These colleges are setup with the sole aim of making money. Education is just
a side effect. Students get no academic freedom and have no space to learn
outside of a very narrowly defined "syllabus".

The worse problem is that most students who end up in Engineering Colleges
have absolutely no interest in becoming engineers. They do manage to somehow
graduate and get an "IT job". They end up being mediocre engineers and at the
earliest opportunity try to find a way out. These poor souls end up giving a
bad name to Indian Engineers.

What about those who want to be engineers because they like to build things
and love to tinker around? The hacker types? Getting into an engineering
college requires a lot of money. If and when they do get into an engineering
college it's a poor quality one. They are forced to spend time only on mugging
up equations and theorems. They get no space to build circuits of their own or
blow up stuff for the heck of it. Assignments are a joke, they require no
application of thought and all that's required is merely copying stuff from
the text book onto paper. The poor dispirted hackers end up languishing in low
paying jobs or find an escape route by moving out of the country where their
talents are recognised.

tl;dr : Quality suffers when quantity increases beyond limit.

~~~
sown
It sounds like education could be even more disrupted there than here?

~~~
gingerjoos
Definitely! At the very least some labs where hackers could come and make
stuff with Arduino boards or write IRC bots that did crazy, but useless
things. All for the sake of learning.

~~~
kamaal
For that to succeed you need to ensure technical folks getting hired are very
well compensated.

The issue is most people coming from middle class background have big dreams
to make money, build a good home and settle down. So the crowd goes where the
money is.

Sure there are going to be passionate people, but if its not rewarding sooner
or later they are going ask if its worth it.

~~~
gingerjoos
One thing that could help is a surge of tech-oriented startups. Startups in
India tended to be copies of well-established models in the U.S. Things are
beginning to change. I've personally seen a few startups which have innovative
and tech-heavy products founded in India which caters to the U.S. market.

------
damian2000
This is another way of paying for a qualification that you don't deserve, and
in doing so it dilutes the standard of graduates. I've heard personally from
an Indian friend that this is very common - and is the reason that he came to
Australia to study.

~~~
capex
The situation in Australia is hardly any different.
[http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/uni-
cheats-...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/uni-cheats-buy-
work-in-cyberspace-20121002-26xhj.html)

~~~
damian2000
No doubt - there's cheats everywhere... but I don't think its near the scale
of India.

~~~
swatkat
@damian2000, [citation needed]

~~~
intended
I can chime in here - I've studied in the India - then the states and then
back in India.

Copying is endemic. Amongst the final year students in my CS class of nearly
50 I think maybe 1 person did it on their own.

The rest knew a guy who knew a guy who had a copy of the project.

This is for your undergrad degree.

For my 10th standard practical exams, which I did in one of the more strict
institutions, the invigilator who came from another school left the room for a
short time, and my physics professor came in and took a look at what we were
doing.

he didn't give us advice directly, but with enough stern looks and exasperated
sighs he let people know what they were doing wrong, and why certain
experiments were doomed to fail. Then again given the sorry state of some of
the equipment like the calipers, I doubt we could have gotten too precise a
measurement anyway.

Similarly for the chem practicals and bio practicals.

I also know that our professors would go to other schools and invigilate
there, where they would return the favor.

Onward to practical exams in undergrad - Comp sci was probably easier to copy
and cheat. The engineering courses were similar though - you could find a
talented student/graduate who would make your projects for you at a price.

This is still nothing, because every year there is a scandal where the
question papers are leaked for almost every exam. This is constant.

People will find a bribe-able teacher or peon and get X or Y exam paper from
them. Again constant and ongoing. This is often the option of the desperate,
who also resort to interesting ways to cheat - such as having your text books
hidden away in the toilets and so on, or on your phones, or scratched onto the
desks or the walls.

\------

I can't find it anymore, but there was a great article written by a
professional paper writer in the US. He used to work for a firm that wrote
papers and articles for college students who could afford them.

He never looked down on his students - some of them were quite wealthy and he
knew that they would go on to do something else once they graduated. So for
him this was just an extension of them learning useful real world skills and
he appreciated those clients who made no pretense and could give instructions
on how he would like an article to be written and what emphasis to be given.

------
bsg75
"After three years of engineering education, the final year student is
struggling to make even a simple circuit work"

If this leads to outsourcing of student projects, and thus a habit to
outsource professional tasks, then that education system is a failure - and an
indictment of outsourcing in general. As engineers are replaced with "business
people", the world becomes less capable.

------
pajju
First of all an undergrad in India is naive and needs good mentoring. That's
missing and no one cares to solve this problem!

I think we have to blame the Indian education system largely for this. The
root cause is - The quality of the system is poor and is broken. But it should
only get better over-time and its happening.

Indian Schooling system is not ready to bring out Quality Engineers. It
doesn't encourage Creative thinking and promote an intellectual environment.

There are many IT companies that fill this void by giving 6months intensive
training because they know the education system.

Another social-cultural reason being - Indians are spoon feed-ed right from
birth. They aren't independent much and depend on schooling more. This
promotes a conservative mindset.

But this norm will gradually change for the better, I'm already seeing today's
young undergrads getting involved in Startup space by asking internships and
are doing some really great work!

In my startup, we have given internship projects to undergrads but we never
value their paper degrees or schooling. We only value their github page, OSS
work and appreciate self-taught programmers.

------
GabrielF00
Wikipedia did a project where students at Indian universities were assigned to
expand and write Wikipedia articles in lieu of their normal coursework. Two
universities were selected - College of Engineering, Pune and Symbiosis School
of Economics. It was a complete disaster - students plagiarized so much
material that Wikipedia blocked one of the universities and then shut down the
project prematurely. For the engineering school, just 13% of the content
students submitted survived cleanup efforts. For the economics school it was a
bit better, but just 29% survived.

Students simply did not have the experience of someone looking at their work
carefully and checking that they were following the rules. The students also
didn't have the skills to understand how to work with sources and how to
paraphrase. Some students were willing and able to change their behavior in
order to contribute good content, but that was only 24% for the economics
school and 2% for the engineering school. Many students just did not have the
English language skills to complete the assignment.

You can read an independent report here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Progr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis/Independent_Report_from_Tory_Read)

------
plinkplonk
There are some structural problems that contribute to (but don't cause) this
phenomenon. By most university rules an engineering student needs to do an
'external project' with a company or research lab to complete his degree.

Technically you _can_ do a project of your own but most professors of
engineering in India are clueless about real world engineering projects and
don't do any research or have projects of their own. Most students are not
pigheaded enough to buck the system by formulating their own projects and
risking failure. (note: I said 'most', IIT s etc are different. Here one is
talking about the equivalent of a school in Hicksville in the middle of
nowhere and totally disconnected from industry).

There are tens of thousands of students needing such an internship/project in
a given city every year. Most schools just wash their hands off the whole deal
and ask their students to 'go get a project done' with no additional guidance.
Most professors, with class sizes of 30 - 50, don't care about formulating or
supervising projects.

How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an
internship on a sharply defined project?

In CS it is often possible to get some kind of project thanks to all the
software companies in India, but in other fields like mechanical or electrical
engineering, there simple are no projects available. These 'project providers'
step into the void and provide 'internships' which exist only on paper and
provide a complete project report to the student, who pays substantial (in
local currency) fees, submits the report to his clueless profs and ticks off
his 'project complete' checkbox.

Now, _added_ to this structural problem is the fact that most engineering
schools in India approach the teaching of engineering as 'book learning'.
Students memorize formulae and regurgitate them in exams without the faintest
clue of how to actually build anything (hence the 'can't build a circuit'
description in the OP). Just to complicate things, students have no training
in technical writing, and even assuming they have a thesis, and know how to do
confirming experiments and so on they still have trouble writing a hundred
pages in English.

None of this is to excuse any of the participants in this farce. This needs to
be exposed, and corrected. Just identifying some underlying factors. If the
professors decided to clamp down on such fraud, there is _no way_ this will
continue. But most are happy to play along.

An offshoot of this is the business of creating personal essays for admissions
to US schools. Professors in the US, if you see a hundred admission letters
starting with "Two Roads diverged in a wood " ( I am NOT joking. I've seen
'professionally prepared' essays that start this way,) you know your
prospective student has outsourced his personal essay.

Some of these outsourcers get admitted to US universities, or get good jobs
and so their path gets validated for younger generations as the 'smart thing
to do'.

And so the dance continues.

somewhat tangential, personal 'external project' anecdote from a long time ago

I studied Industrial Engineering in a decent but not great school and my profs
were well meaning but not particularly clueful. They saw Industrial
Engineering as an offshoot of Mechanical Engineering and shot down all my
proposed 'build a compiler' type projects (I wanted to do a software project),
because 'That is computer Science, not Mechanical or Industrial Engineering.
You have to do a project in Mechanical Engineering'.

So I compromised by forming a team with a couple of sharp guys, writing a
small but sophisticated (given the circumstances) CAD program in Turbo C on a
486 PC ( hey it even had a scripting component - I did get to write a compiler
after all), printed out all the code, added an introductory page and that was
my 'project report'.

The profs were a bit taken aback at the hundreds of pages of C code (which
they couldn't read or grok) but the software worked, I could answer all their
questions, and CAD was "mechanical engineering" so I got top grades for the
project. [1]

I later heard from some of my juniors that the profs used to tell them about
this 'very talented bunch of guys who did a great project and you should
emulate them' but I don't think anyone took that advice ;).

[1]That was the only 'course' for which I had anything like a top grade. I was
bored to tears and rarely attended class and spent all my time chasing girls
and scraped by in some of the "write down from memory the formula for stress
in a cantilever beam" type examinations by deriving enough stuff from scratch
to get a passing grade. Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored.

I completed my degree only because my employer(Cybercash, now defunct, but was
one of the pioneers in payment processing, HQ in Virginia, with the devs in
Bangalore) begged me to, so I could get a visa to go to the USA, and you
couldn't get a visa without a degree. I wrote 22 exams in two weeks and got my
degree. To this day I don't know anything about Mechanical Engineering.

PS: In retrospect I should have just (minimally) played the game of dutifully
attending classes and so on and spend half an hour or so every day memorizing
the facts and formulae required to get good grades. Would have saved a lot of
stress.

Instead I rebelled against the insanity and quit attending class except to
meet my friends. As pg said in one of his essays, (paraphrasing) when you
rebel, you are still playing someone else's game,only with a logical 'not'
added to the rules. You are still dancing to someone else's tune.

I don't have any regrets, but _then_ I was thoroughly confused by the way
engineering was taught and learned and what behavior was lauded and what was
punished.

This was before the internet arrived in India. Now Coursera etc offer me a
veritable cornucopia of insanely great teachers, Amazon has all the books and
I am as happy as a pig in a mud pit learning new stuff well after my hair
turned grey.

~~~
kamaal
>>How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an
internship on a sharply defined project?

Actually answer to this question lies in understanding a simple thing. Most of
us really study to just get a job. That is the fact.

Most people get into software after hearing stories from the 90's. How some
some uncle of theirs, or somebody from their far relatives, or neighbors or
someone from their village did CS engineering, Got into an IT company. And
then went to the US, after which within 5 years the guy became a manager.
Stories of how such people 1.5-2L a month, has a very posh home, car etc. And
then talks of all the beautiful infrastructure, glass buildings. Lets be
frank, most of the people join software for that reason.

The problem now is they don't really know what they are getting into. They
lack the desire or interest to genuinely work towards solving problems. So at
the end its all about 'Somehow get a job'.

The days of 90's are long gone. And there is no such rapid growth these days.

~~~
glesica
This could be, I suspect, both a blessing and a curse for companies like
Coursera and Udacity.

On the one hand, many of the people participating today are probably highly
motivated and doing it out of a desire to learn new things and solve problems.
They may not have access to formal education, for whatever reason, but are
determined to become more educated anyway.

On the other hand, some of the participants probably don't care at all about
learning anything and just want a credential that will stand up to scrutiny.
The goal for this group is to get a job, not necessarily to become qualified
for a job (subtle difference).

Unfortunately, as the "value" of the education offered by online companies
(i.e. recognition by employers) increases, the share of people in the second
category will almost certainly rise quickly.

Ideally, the market will discount this form of education appropriately (as it
theoretically does with all other forms of education). The "value" of a
Coursera certificate, for instance, would be constrained by the risk of
accidentally hiring a person from the second category above, who may have
graduated, but failed to learn any useful skills.

However, the business model for these companies seems to be based on providing
education to a massive number of people. If the market heavily discounts the
education they provide, the business model might become impractical.

It seems to me that the biggest concern for Coursera and similar should be
finding ways to enforce academic integrity standards to make sure that even
the students in the second category actually end up learning something.

While this will, perhaps, result in fewer students initially, it will also
keep the market from heavily discounting graduates of online programs, thus
destroying the market for their services in the longer-run.

------
varrunr
OK, maybe some students do outsource their projects. This does not mean that
hard working students who can prove themselves otherwise are ignored. To
companies like Infosys, CTS etc. who actually indulge in mass recruiting and
have pathetic interview standards, of course, this might make a difference.
But to good companies how want to recruit good Engineers, projects on the
resume can only aid in interview calls. A lack of knowledge would be apparent
in an interview. While you explain the problem, you never make an attempt at
finding or listing a solution for the same. But instead, you end your post
with a rhetorical statement.

Analyzing this problem, I think it can be attributed to widespread plagiarism
in engineering schools in India. In the US, plagiarism is dealt with severely
and can even lead to expulsion. This forces Indian students who used to
indulge in malpractices in their undergrad to put on their thinking hats for
once and be creative, for the fear of expulsion(which would be a disaster
after so much preparation). Thats when one realizes the consequences of ones
action. Such a system should be enforced in colleges in India.

------
cmadan
Fortunately, for these group of students the benefit is short lived and mainly
on paper. They have better grades compared to their honest peers because of
the complicity from professors (it is trivial to figure out whether someone
has done the project or outsourced it, but they don't care).

But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually
struggle. I've seen so many students with average grades ultimately be
recruited for the best jobs available on the market because they preferred to
spend their time on TopCoder instead of gaming the system.

In some ways, I feel sorry for them. Most of them do it due to the herd
mentality, everyone is outsourcing their projects so they must outsource their
projects too. Clearly, this doesn't work out very in the long term and what
they gain by taking the easy way out, they lose in terms of denying themselves
the opportunity to gain some practical experience.

~~~
kamaal
>>Fortunately, for these group of students the benefit is short lived and
mainly on paper.

Sorry these are precisely the kind of guys who end up being mid level managers
in large corporates.

>>But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually
struggle.

Interview in India are a joke. Body shops pick up people for marks, and
familiarity with objective questions roaming around on the internet.

~~~
pjscott
> Sorry these are precisely the kind of guys who end up being mid level
> managers in large corporates.

If it's any consolation, those large corporations get what they deserve: they
end up with middle managers who cheated their way out of an education. There's
some justice in this.

------
TokenAccount
Just to balance out all the negative commentary about Indian education (which
I'm not discounting by any means), I would like to offer my experience as a
college student in one of India's premier engineering colleges (hint, y'all
know it's name).

I was a chemistry student in a mostly technical (engineering) college. Nobody
in this college would _dream_ of the kinds of blatant cheating I hear about at
other places. Yes, people helping each other in their projects... imbalanced
project teams with one brilliant student putting in most of the effort etc,
that level of dubious behaviour was not uncommon (but not _too_ common
either).

I got to play around with computers as my final year project. It was
computational chemistry. I built a simulation model of a large number of
molecules floating around under each other's forces and watch their emergent
behaviour over simulated time. I'm rather proud of that project to this day.

And I was not alone by any means. A few of my batchmates' project work ended
up in published papers (yes, our professors were expected to carry out
international level research along with teaching). I interacted a bit with the
computer science people too (since I was working on high performance compute
clusters etc.). Some of the software I saw them build was impressive but I
didn't know _how_ impressive at that stage in my life.

Later I switched fields and ended up doing a masters in computer science in a
US university (picked up the under-graduate material through self-study and
audited classes over a few years of pretending to do science research and
TA'ing :-) )

Then I realized that the computer science students I came across back in my
Indian college were doing some very impressive work for undergraduates.

So there. I hope it provides a reasonable counter-point to all the negative
stuff about Indian students/colleges. My school is definitely not the common
case... but it and many others like it do exist. (I'm posting from a throw-
away account for reasons best left unstated.)

------
paolord
This also happens in the Philippines. Sometimes the reason why students
outsource projects isn't exactly related to how good they are academically.
Some students(both good and bad) finish projects themselves and some outsource
because they'd rather focus on a more important subject or project. Some even
have part time jobs and really doesn't have the time. Even the really smart
students sometimes outsource, these students have already been training and
specializing on one field and if their project happens to be on a different
field they'd rather have someone else do it than have bad marks. And about the
project making companies, they're more like "teams" here in the Philippines.
Mostly undergrads or graduates that haven't found jobs or programmers that
have jobs but wants some extra-income.

------
gunn
I think deciding that learning and understanding is more important than
pleasing markers and getting a qualification is one of the most important
decisions you can make.

One of my favourite movies ever is a bollywood film on this topic. 3 Idiots.
Here's a snippet: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35sfBjmVWpU>

------
pravinkenator
Actually this is extremely common and infact, projects for undergraduates and
post graduates are a thriving business in India. The colleges give a damn
about this and they are seldom bothered. This kind of practice is extremely
common in government aided universities in India.

But, I must also say that there are some universities where the students
perform exceptionally.

------
xradionut
Problems like this are vexing, even to us non-Indians in the US. I've had the
privilege of working with some awesome engineers from around the world, but
issues of this ilk taint the opinions of many folks in IT and CS. It's bad
enough that these assumptions hurt the careers of truly talented and dedicated
engineers and programmers.

------
realrocker
Relevant experience of mine.
[http://honestmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/sales-
before-e...](http://honestmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/sales-before-
engineering-lessons-i-learnt-from-my-first-business/) .

------
intel8085
Not every guy who did their project themselves ended up as an entrepreneur,
but almost all entrepreneurs did their college projects themselves.

~~~
arunprabu
I think u r right. not many are business owners. I did my academic projects
myself and now an entrepreneur.

------
arunprabu
I did all 2 of my academic projects in my college itself, while many others
did outside.

------
vanderghast
I don't think the issue is an Indian issue. More likely its just because a
very small number of people should actually be taking engineering, but because
of how lucrative it is, so many people take it who shouldn't be there.

I went to Stanford in the early 2000s for undergrad and majored in EE.

EE classes would normally have up to 50-60 students in lectures. Lectures
would be taken by professors, many of whom were leading experts in their
field, and some would be visibly bored or annoyed at having to teach
ridiculously simple undergrad classes. You can imagine Nobel prize winners
trying to teach basic physics.

Students did not learn much from these professors, some of whom would just
recite from the textbook (which they had written). So students stopped coming
to class. And Stanford even then recorded and streamed most engineering
lectures, so by middle of the term only 5-6 students would show up to class.
Then you go for the final exam and there are like 100 students who show up,
everyone surprised the class was so big!

They had problem sets every week, and tutorial sessions where you could get
one on one attention with graduate students. These were the most personalized
attention you could get during the course.

You had a choice at Stanford. You could either choose to learn, or you could
choose to have good grades. Only the top 5% of the class, the real geniuses
could learn and get good grades at the same time.

I was not that smart. So I spent the first two years taking classes I was
interested in. Mostly skipped the lectures, and took as many classes as
possible. I was a solid B student. Then I got tired, and decided EE was not
for me. Thought about switching majors but it was too late. So decided to get
through on the bare minimum of effort.

As soon as I flipped that switch, I met the other group of people, the ones
focused on good grades and enjoying life.

In order to get good grades, you have to do well in problem sets, midterm,
final exam and project for each class.

Problem sets - It's ok to copy answers. We used to have a basket in the EE
office where people turned in answers. Just go one day early and grab someone
else's paper. Copy, return. If the guy turned it in a day or two early, he
must have known what he was doing.

Project - Even easier. Stanford had so many socially inept engineers. Guys who
don't even speak in class and usually very quiet or weird. These guys need
friends too. Be their friend. Be in their project group. You don't even have
to do anything. The smart guy will do all the work, won't even complain or
tell the prof. Why? Because most of the really smart guys are really arrogant
that their smart, and they believe they don't need anyone else. They're
annoyed they have to have project partners. As long as they have to have a
partner, then one who is friendly but doesn't interfere with their ideas or
vision for the project is the best.

Mid-term and finals - The last week before the mid term or final, show up for
the tutorials. Most of the grad students teaching them will focus on the
problems most likely to come out in the exam.

Voila. I was an A student the last two years. And graduated without knowing
anything. I told my faculty advisor I just wanted to get my degree and get
out!

And the funny thing is, I have friends who have made a career out of "getting
grades" this way. Think about all those venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Those were the kids who were friends of smart engineers. Think of Sheryl
Sandberg, Eric Schmidt etc. The managers without significant technical
knowledge.

