Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

WORRIED ABOUT YOUR PROJECT? There’s professional ‘help’ at hand

An airy room in a congested building is where you register. “The projects will be prepared in Saidapet”, the person at the counter informs me. I ask for a project in “Mobile sensor technology”, security or performance. Frankly, all that is Greek to me, but my friend, a student of electronics, suggested I ask for it to avoid detection.

The person in-charge opens his laptop and lets me have a look at two lists. “Do you want the project done in Dot Net or Java?” An individual project will cost at least Rs. 6,500, but if I manage to pull in five other people (that is brainwash five of my friends to buy a project each) then I’ll get a Rs. 500 discount. For group projects, it’s either Rs. 3,000 per head (for a four-member group) or Rs. 3,500 per head (for a three-member group). Now, these are the rates for IEEE standard projects. If I can do with a non-IEEE project, then a project for an individual would cost Rs. 5,500. And, I cannot give my ideas. “That could be costly,” explains the owner. So I can only pick from the shop’s ideas.

As I leave, the person at the counter informs me that the city is divided into zones for buying college projects. “For embedded projects it is Ritchie Street, for Biomedical it is Egmore, for IT, it is Kodambakkam and Saidapet.”

A walk down this street makes me realise that the businesses aren’t exactly working from the shadows. In fact, they advertise in bold letters, one shop even has a tube-lit board that reads “College Projects.”

I climb a dingy staircase and reach another store. “Even parents come to buy school projects,” says the shop owner. “Especially during school exhibitions.” School projects cost from Rs. 100 upward.

A faculty member at an engineering college says he knows that students buy projects. “We tell them not to do it. But sometimes by the end of the year, they have already got their placement and so they don’t bother much about the project,” he says. As professors keep track of the students’ performance through the year, they can detect a sham when a poor student submits a good project. “Some strict professors give very low marks, when they detect foul play.”

It’s not just the ‘techies’, even few ‘bards’ pick the easy route. Some students of language buy essays online. A Google search for “college essays + sale” throws up sites such as Orderpapers and ironically, MyEssays. Orderpaper assures the buyers that they have PhDs on board and MyEssays claims they provide a “fresh essay, and not from a (sic) exhausted, plagiarised paper.”

Considering the grammar mistake in the introduction to MyEssays (“a exhausted”), perhaps language students should at least edit the essays before submitting them.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail