https://www.upwork.com/freelance-jobs/apply/Racket-Programming-help-Urgent_~01d2c195800fee4731/

The description makes it sound as a “make my homework” posting, but then …

Any ideas?

Could it be someone, who accepts homework tasks from others and then hires others to do it?

I’m on Upwork and I sometime get requests for Racket that turn out to be homework. I turn them down every time, but unfortunately information on who the clients are is limited during the “pre-hire” phase so I’m never sure which college they’re coming from.

The screenshot you posted look familiar and that person has contacted me in the past. I think you’re correct that person accept homework assignments from others and then contract them out, it helps to prevent from finding out who they are.

I am surprised by the amount "$10k+ total spent".

Sadly, there are plenty of people out there who are desperate enough to pay someone else to do their homework :disappointed: There are also enough people with the skills and desperate-enough financial situations to do it for the amounts those other people are willing pay.

Supposedly competitive programming competitions are open book; you’re allowed - even encouraged - to bring a binder full of code listings with you. The theory being, the real skill isn’t in manually coding up algorithms, it’s in recognizing which algorithm you should use in the first place.

I also worked at a company where part of thé (famously brutal) interview process was that you took an existing code listing and critiqued it.

Both of those feel like more real-world takes on what it’s actually like to code professionally. I wonder if schools could simultaneously make their homework a more effective measure of practical skill and knowledge acquisition, and make cheating harder, by redesigning homeworks along these lines.