But now, thanks to the Internet, university students are also outsourcing their assignments.
And universities are powerless to detect and prevent it, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.
Computer science students are farming out their coursework to cheap programmers in countries like India.
Internet sites such as RentACoder and Kasamba provide an international marketplace connecting businesses in need of computer programming help with low-cost coders around the world.
But dishonest students have already seized on the outsourcing trend to avoid doing homework.
Typically, assignments are put out to tender on the Internet sites and coders bid to complete them.
Students can pay anywhere from under $130 to several hundred dollars, depending on the amount of work required.
The practice isn't limited to programming. Various well-established sites already sell students essays and other written work.
But with code, which is far more black and white than the written word, it's far harder to spot outsourcing.
"We're aware that it happens and we're catching some people but I think that's the tip of the iceberg," said Mr
David Wilson, associate dean of teaching and learning for information technology at the University of Technololgy, Sydney.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Part of the problem, said Professor Paul Compton, head of the school of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, was that existing automated plagiarism detection tools, such as Turn It In, can't detect outsourced work.
They could only tell if multiple students submitted highly similar assignments or if a piece of work had passages copied from the internet.
"If the coder provides the same solution to a few students, we'll catch them via the plagiarism detection but if they only provide it to one student, you essentially can't catch them," said Professor Compton.
To combat the problem, university staff scour the rent-a-coder sites looking for assignments they've assigned.
But even this is fraught with difficulty as the tech-savvy computer science students typically use an e-mail address and alias that makes it difficult to identify them.
Another strategy is to conduct more exams supervised by university staff, instead of putting a heavy emphasis on take-home assignments.
Lecturers contacted by Fairfax Media agreed unanimously that outsourcing coursework was a significant and growing problem, but because of the difficulties in detecting it, it's impossible to tell exactly how widespread the practice is.
A 2006 study conducted by researchers at the University of Central England in Birmingham found over 12 per cent of postings on a popular rent-a-coder site were bid requests from dishonest students.
This article was first published in The New Paper on 4 July 2008.
