British students are using Indian expertise in information technology to complete their course assignments by posting them on outsourcing websites and buying the completed coursework.

Called 'contract cheating' in academic circles, lecturers in computing department in universities are in a tizzy since such coursework is of high quality and difficult to detect through normal plagiarism detection software.

The students pay amounts ranging from 5 to 50 pounds for the completed coursework and then pass it off as their own work and gain their degrees.

The trend is particularly seen in IT courses, in which students need to write programmes.

The students use legitimate websites normally used by business, offering freelance project work or tutorial sites specifically set up for the purpose.

India and Romania are popular destinations where such assignments are completed for a fee. IT professionals bid to complete the assignments and British students who post them then select the lowest bid.

The phenomenon was detected by Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke, lecturers at the Birmingham City University's Department of Computing.

"India is a common one. People can speak English there. Businesses are off-shoring their call centres to India so there is a connection. The money someone will pay in this country is very good pay over there," Lancaster said.

According to Clarke, students are paying for their work to be done by professionals over the web.

"Previous research has shown that over 12 per cent of postings on a popular website for outsourcing computer contract work were actually bid requests from students looking to attempt contract cheating," he said.

"As it is relatively difficult to track down and most academic institutions do not specifically address contract cheating -- although they have strict policies for plagiarism -- we feel that this is something that requires our attention to uphold academic integrity.

"We will be looking at the basic ways in which this can be tackled, encompassing how tutors should design assignments, detecting contract cheating and regulations that can be enforced to deal with students who engage in contract cheating," he said.

In their research, Lancaster and Clarke analysed postings on a number of business outsourcing websites over a 20-month period, between 2004 and 2006, and found about 1,000 cases of contract cheating.

"We probably have had about another 400 to 500 cases on top of that since. My estimate is we have about 5,000 in all including those that are untraceable at the moment," Clarke said.

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