Is it ethical to hire someone to program for a study project?

Question

There is a small study project at university Z if someone did it and wrote a report, will be award an extra certificate. The project can be done as group work. The project was started with 2 person X and Y. Student x wrote the required codes in one programming language. Due to many troubles, it had to be written in another language by Student Y.

However, Student Y hired someone to translate the codes to the new language. My question is: Is it ethical? Especially, Student Y seems to not have any intention of acknowledging this in the report?

How it can affect the future of other students, if they decided to continue a career in academia?

Answer 1

Outside of a course context it would be ethical. People doing research can hire specialists for many tasks.

However, within a course context it depends on the rules in place and it should, at the least, be revealed to the professor who assigned the project. Done in secret, however, it is possibly problematic since the learning objective of such a project is the important thing, not the final result. And it could well be that getting the programming "right" was one of the key learning objectives of the project.

And not acknowledging it would seem to be a clear ethical lapse. It might be necessary for other students in the group to disassociate themselves from the "offender". But a joint discussion with the professor and everyone else might make it clear and provide an acceptable outcome for most or all of the students.

But, again, it is the learning that is important. Don't lose track of that. You weren't asked to do the project (in almost all cases) because the professor needed the results, but so that you would learn.

Answer 2

My question is: Is it ethical? Especially, Student Y seems to not have any intention of acknowledging this in the report?

It’s ethical precisely if the contribution of the hired party is acknowledged in the report. Otherwise it’s plagiarism, a form of academic misconduct. All students who signed their name to the work will be regarded as guilty of this offense, including the ones who didn’t actually hire the outside contributor (although their offense might be deemed more minor, and hypothetically speaking they can try to deny knowing about what their group member did; whether that defense would work, I can’t say).

How it can affect the future of other students, if they decided to continue a career in academia?

Being found guilty of plagiarism is not necessarily a career killer, but it can definitely result in some bad consequences including major setbacks to your academic career, and potentially expulsion from school. It’s also possible that you could get off with very minor consequences, but I wouldn’t recommend (to put it mildly) trying to find out.

Here are some suggestions for how you could handle this awkward situation:

1. ideally, convince your group member to report to the professor what happened (including the explanation of why it seemed necessary to hire someone, while acknowledging that that was a mistake to do it without getting the professor’s approval first, and apologizing for their display of poor judgment).

2. if the group member cannot be convinced, you can inform the professor of what happened yourself (i.e., be a “snitch” — in most places there is a stigma associated with doing this, and it’s true that you would be violating the other student’s trust, but since your own reputation is at risk, there is an argument to be made that that’s an appropriate thing to do).

3. A third, more diplomatic option is to go to the professor, explain that you encountered irreconcilable differences with one of your team members, without elaborating, and ask to be given an alternative assignment that does not involve working with that person.

4. Finally, there is the option of going along with the misconduct. I think that’s a terrible idea and significantly less preferable to each of the above three options.

Answer 3

IMHO, that depends on the exact scope of work done by the translator and whether the translator has been compensated for it by student Y. Indeed, if I need to read some mathematical paper in Chinese, I can send it to the translation services, pay standard fees, and then, if I use some ideas from that paper in my project, I am obliged to acknowledge the paper itself, but not the translator work because I have already compensated for the latter according to the standard agreement (though, of course, I can consider mentioning the latter as an option). If that is what has happened (i.e., the code was blindly translated from, say, pascal to C++ for a fee without any attempt to improve it or to make it work properly), then I see no ethical problem whatsoever.

The ethical problem will arise, however, if the translator took an active part in the correction or further development of the code. In that case he/she has effectively become a co-author of the final product with all consequences it implies.