It Takes Two to Tango: When Students Outsource Their Own Learning

I recently came across a thread where someone shared that they had been scammed by a customer. According to the thread, the customer was an internship student who requested help preparing presentation slides for her industrial training. The freelancer was given more than 80 pages of a logbook, had to read through it, extract the relevant information, arrange everything into slides, and even make several design revisions overnight. After completing the work, the freelancer reportedly asked for payment—only to later discover that they had been blocked.

Of course, not paying someone after they have completed an agreed service is wrong. RM45 may sound small to some people, but time and effort still have value. Staying up until the early morning to meet someone else's deadline and then being blocked afterwards is understandably frustrating. If you commission a legitimate service, you should pay for it. On that part, I have no disagreement.

But there is another side of this story that bothers me just as much.

An internship presentation is not simply another PowerPoint deck. It is supposed to represent what the student experienced, understood and learned during their industrial training. The student should know what happened during the internship better than anyone else. They should be the one reading their own logbook, deciding what information matters and figuring out how to explain their experience.

There is also a difference between design assistance and doing the work itself. If a student has already prepared all the content and hires someone to improve the visual layout, create graphics or tidy up the formatting, that is one thing. But when another person has to read more than 80 pages, search for the important information and decide what goes into the presentation, a significant part of the student's task has already been outsourced. At that point, we should question what exactly the student is being assessed on.

Assignments, presentations and internship reports exist for a reason. They are not obstacles placed in front of students just so they can obtain marks. The process of struggling through the information, organising thoughts, deciding what is relevant and presenting it clearly is part of the learning itself.

If every difficult or time-consuming task is handed to somebody else, the student may still receive a polished submission, but they lose the experience the assignment was designed to provide. Eventually, that creates graduates who have certificates showing that they completed certain tasks without necessarily developing the skills behind them. Education becomes a transaction instead of a learning process.

And saying “I don't know how to make slides” does not really solve that problem. You learn by trying. You search for examples, ask for guidance, use templates, consult your lecturer, use tools responsibly and improve along the way. Not knowing something should be the beginning of learning, not automatically a reason to outsource it.

This is where I probably disagree with some people.

It is easy to look at the thread and see only a freelancer who did not receive payment. From a purely transactional perspective, yes—the freelancer delivered something and deserved to be paid according to the agreement. But ethical responsibility does not disappear simply because money is involved.

If there were no people willing to complete academic work for students, students would have fewer opportunities to outsource their responsibilities in the first place. Services like this exist because there is demand, but the demand continues because someone is willing to supply it. That is why I cannot completely separate the student from the person providing the service.

It takes two to tango. The student should not be looking for someone to do the learning on their behalf, and service providers should think carefully about the kind of work they accept.

There are plenty of ethical ways to earn money from students. Teach them how to structure their presentation. Review their slides and suggest improvements. Proofread their writing. Create a template. Tutor them. Explain how to turn a long internship logbook into several presentation points. Those services still provide value without replacing the student in the learning process.

The distinction I would use is simple: Help me do my work better is very different from do my work for me.

Students absolutely deserve support. They do not need to struggle unnecessarily when guidance, technology and professional services are available. But support should make students more capable of doing their own work—not make it possible for them to avoid doing it entirely.

We do not have to choose between condemning the scam and questioning the service itself. If someone deliberately receives completed work and refuses to pay, that behaviour is wrong. At the same time, outsourcing academic work that exists specifically to assess a student's own understanding is also something we should stop normalising.

One person's wrongdoing does not automatically make the other side right. Sometimes, both sides need to reconsider what they are doing.