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This is terrible. I am from India and I know how deeply copying is rooted in the brains of students here. Basically, all parents (and thus children) care about is marks. So, students learn copying and tend to copy all the assignments. Plug, we have professors who are good for nothing and accept this equally.

Recently, I made a small web app and got lowest marks in class for project. In another project, when I told my idea to professor, she was all like, "this is too small, increase the scope!" So, my idea of attendance tracker expended to "Learning Management System". I used WordPress as foundation for app and added plugins. Instead of testing anything, professor asked, "What does "collapse menu" do?" Nothing else asked.

Other people who copied it all and shied crappy command line "hospital management system" and other things scored way higher than me.

While all people do not copy here, copying is not checked at all and this indirectly encourages it. India is worst place to be a programmer right now. At least in college. I don't think companies are any better. I had a friend certified as "Java Programmer" for a crappy one day program.



Well yours may be the typical scenario. I had the slightly opposite experience.

I built Warehouse management system with RFID. i bought a RFID reader and few cards, connected with serial port to PC and basically had a checkout check-in system in place (for the curious, Java is the language, sadly i lost the original source code :( still have the RFID reader tough ).

On the demo day the professor was so happy with my project, the first question e asked was "From where did u buy this project?" . He was very reluctant to believe that projects of such scope can be built by students. If the professors are so sure the projects are copied, why do they even grade them?.

Ya and most of the students in my class bought projects(C Compiler, Steganography etc,) for few thousand rupees and got equally good marks (Hey , i got the top mark ;) .


Great work there.

I've had same experience when in my first year, I made a GUI app with Win32 API while others were giving command line stuff. Teacher clearly said, "This is too complex, even I will need 2-3 days to understand it. Did you buy it?"

I have to make fourth year project soon, hope I get same reaction!


Highest compliment I ever got from a teacher: "You got then highest score of everyone who didn't cheat."

I think that knowing that he knew that they cheated and I didn't, that meant something that lasted more than that the artificial confines of that one class.


I recall being in a similar situation. I had done significant marketing/PR for my project and that helped me avoid this issue. Since mine was an original project (a rare phenomenon), it was not very difficult to get the project famous amongst other students and then the professors.

The students in the next semester started asking me for the project files to copy it for submission as their own project. I had to be very polite to not give while maintaining my relationship with them.


Wasted opportunity! Open source it, and send everyone a link. Including the professor.


This was a hardware project (IC design) I did back in 1998. Open source hardware was uncommon then, and most of the professors were not even online. Further, open-sourcing this would have meant more students in the upcoming semesters copying the work and submitting it as their own, something which I did not want.




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