In India, engineering students outsource their academic projects

>> 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.

Graduated a couple of years back, from a local school in Bangalore, and I have a bittersweet experience regarding this. I happened to speak to my prof recently and when asked how things were going, she shrugged and replied, "Its the usual. Most of them are waiting for TCS/Infosys to conduct college placements and they're just trying to get through their final sem". Unfortunately, "Get through" is usually just an euphemism for what was reported in the article.

>> Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored.

I can relate to this. I was in a CS degree and I was busy making basic websites, doing an internship at a local startup, playing for the college football team and trying out dramatics. I realized I wasn't going to get much out of class anyway and I'd be better off having fun while trying out a bunch of things. But all this changed when it came down to the final sem when I was actually required to do something on my own.

I pulled a friend along with me and we hacked together a basic AI search engine for the same startup, using Ruby, Rails and Princeton's WordNet database. The code by itself wasn't the most palatable, but it worked.

But, here's the real kicker. While, the overwhelming majority of my peers, cherrypicked a project from a catalogue and bought it from an "institute", some of them even managed to score more than me. I personally don't attach much emphasis to grades, but the worrying part is, not only does our system tolerate the plague, going by the grades, it vindicates it.

So, how do we remedy this system? I certainly don't have a blueprint but I do feel, there is a desperate paucity of examples. We need more startups, entrpreneurs, hackers, scientists and we need them to do really well nationally/internationally. Currently, whatever little we have of the above mentioned, a lot of them, in my experience happened in spite of our education system.

PS: I mentioned to my prof about CS project opportunities at the startup I work. I hope a few students do turn up.

Sadly, I can relate. I'm in my final year in a (not so great) College in Delhi, and all everyone talks about is Infosys/TCS. Summer internships were a joke. I'm pretty sure that me and a friend were the only ones who tried to get a genuine internship (and were interviews). For the rest of the class, it was Java/.NET certification courses galore. I've been lucky that I found a startup with a bunch of really smart guys who knew I wanted to learn more than anything else and understood the situation I was stuck in. Needless to say, these past 4 months have been the best ever since I started getting into programming. :)

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.

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...