Indian websites doing Oz students' homework for $2

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Melbourne: Cheating seems to be getting advanced with Oz students outsourcing essays to foreign sweatshops to get their work done at cheaper rates.

Websites such as canadianessays.com, realassignment writing.com and dissertation india.com offer fixed-price tariffs or auction-style services where students put work out to tender and workers, mostly graduates from India and Pakistan, bid to take on the projects.

Schools, however, are unable to stop cheaters using the outsourcing services because custom-made work cannot usually be detected by plagiarism software.

Matt Barrie, founder of freelancer.com, a website designed to put small businesses in touch with affordable labour in emerging economies, said homework assignments were frequently submitted to his site.

"We get them all the time. As a lecturer myself, I really don't approve, but kids will be kids - they will always find a way to cheat," News.com.au quoted Barrie, as saying.

"There are students in India who will give answers for just a few dollars and I have seen maths questions answered for 2-dollar a go," said Barrie.

According to the Telegraph, Mohammed Ali Khan, of Islamabad, who has been turning out essays and papers for high school and university students, charging two dollars per 100 words," said: "It's my part-time job. I get work from all over the world including Australia, the US and the UK. Pakistan."

"I've done many jobs for Australian students. Australians mainly ask for university papers but I've done some high-school work, too," he said.

Meanwhile, academics are concerned about the new customised cheating factories on the net.

"We take this very seriously but, sadly, it's no surprise," said Craig Ellis of the University of Western Sydney.

"In the past five years there's been an explosion in sites where you can download pre-written assignments, but we have the mechanisms that allow us to cross-reference essays to identify this. But the trend towards custom-produced work at such low costs is particularly worrying because it is that much harder to spot," said Ellis.