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Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

62 points by jayadevan 13y ago

jstanley 13y ago
This is shocking. I'm competing in Code Jam, and it's nice to think that everyone is interested in playing fair. If you're not capable of solving the problems at this stage, you won't be capable of solving them at the later stages either, so in that respect I don't really see the point in cheating. All it really means is that a few of the borderline-qualifying competitors missed out. EDIT: Might be interesting to download everybody's round 1B solutions and look for similarity. I'm going to attempt to do this now. EDIT2: Boy, Google sure don't make it easy to download everybody's solutions...
- testbro 13y ago
  This behaviour was common in the last Facebook Hacker Cup too. Most of the announcements of rounds starting included discussion of (and in some cases links to) solutions. I guess it's part and parcel - I think Facebook did take action against obvious plagiarisers. If not, the later rounds will weed out the cheaters in any case.
  - fmax30 13y ago
    I think you are missing the point here , instead of 3 cheaters three honest coders could have qualified to the next round , which would in turn give them the chance for competing in round 2 and round 3.
    - zplesivcak 13y ago
      If someone barely missed passing through 1st round, chance for him to make it through any of the following rounds is practically non-existant. Exception being if he's experienced competitor who fell short for some reason.
      - SteveGerencser 13y ago
        So what you are saying is that since they may not have had a chance to win it's okay that someone cheating got ahead of them?
        jstanley 13y ago
        I understand zplesivcak's point. While it is lame that cheating is going on, it doesn't really impact the overall winner of the contest. Also, for the last 3 spots out of 1000, there is a lot of luck involved anyway.
        djKianoosh 13y ago
        you assume a lot there with "last" 3 spots.
        jstanley 13y ago
        Well, it will only be the last 3 spots that are (substantially) affected by 3 cheaters - everybody else either qualified or failed to qualify anyway. And the luck I'm referring to is in timing. If you look at the scoreboard for round 1B, 1000th place scored 34 points and a time of 1:30:38. 1001st place 34 points and a time of 1:30:48. That 10 seconds is nothing if not luck.
      - fmax30 13y ago
        Imagine this scenario ,It is round 1C . A talented programmer started competing there are only 20 minutes to go. He solves the Small and Large test cases for Problem A ,and only the small for problem C. But Alas ! his rank is 1002 , he doesn't qualify even though on topcoder he is in the top 200's.
        jstanley 13y ago
        He took a huge risk by starting with only 20 minutes to go. I would say his failure there lies more with himself than with the 3 cheaters.
jgunsch 13y ago
Aside: Why "Indian coders" and not just "Three coders"? Would this have ever been titled "white coders found cheating"? I know this isn't the point of the article, but I wonder if, on HN, we should consider clipping "gratuitous adjectives" in titles that contribute to perpetuating dominant systems.
- paulhauggis 13y ago
  So we are going to ban facts now? The problem is that it does seem to be cultural. In every one of my computer science classes, students from India almost always shared answers on the test, copied each others' homework, and felt there was no problem with it.
  - Sven7 13y ago
    I always wonder what happens to all these honest Americans once they get into Wall Street. Or these days Silicon Valley where keeping people addicted to social feeds and video streams is making an honest living. Let not even talk about the guys who sold the rest of the world on WMD's.
    - illuminate 13y ago
      "I always wonder what happens to all these honest Americans once they get into Wall Street." The rest probably get filtered out well before reaching that point.
    - paulhauggis 13y ago
      2 wrongs don't make a right. If we choose to ignore a problem that continues to happen because we want to be more PC, it will never stop.
- deletes 13y ago
  They are from the country named India. Thus Indian coders. Color has nothing to do with it. If they were from America the title would not have been white coders but American coders.
GuiA 13y ago
Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures? I distinctly remember my grad school classes, where even by getting 95% I'd be dead last in the class rankings because all the Chinese/Indian students would get 98/99/100% on their assignments. I didn't really care about it, figuring that their studying habits were much more diligent than mine, until one time I arrived in the classroom 45 minutes early and found out a sizable proportion of them were merrily exchanging answers and copying off of each other. I then learned that it was something they would do pretty much every single time. (of course, it was not all of them– a few were hard workers who went by the rules. But in all of my classes, the majority of students from those cultures would operate in such a manner). So I'm wondering– is this purely selection bias, or is collusion just more acceptable in certain cultures? The US (and most of Europe) heavily penalizes it at all levels of education, but I wonder if it's the case everywhere in the world.
- obviouslygreen 13y ago
  Given all the anecdotes around here offering the same experience, I'm interested in this too. If it is a cultural thing, I'd say two things: 1. It makes sense. A lot of sense. In the real world, it's far more useful to be able to collaborate effectively than to always adopt an adversarial or competitive attitude. 2. It should be addressed openly. Personally, I think a more collaborative environment would help a lot of us in a lot of ways, but sometimes that's just not how things are supposed to be done (e.g. assignments and tests in most US schools); in that case, everyone might be a little more aware and happy if it were clear up front -- in very multi-cultural situations -- what the expectations are regarding individual work. Of course, that won't stop everyone, and it doesn't address every problem, but making everyone aware of the differences could stop a lot of misunderstanding and, potentially, what's technically cheating even though that may not be the intent. [edit: Of course, some people do just plain cheat, knowingly and willfully; this is not intended to excuse that behavior, which is crap and should be punished.]
  - jstanley 13y ago
    I think the Code Jam incident is an example of knowingly and willfully cheating. It is obvious that you are supposed to be competing individually. Even in the event that that isn't obvious, why signup for 3 accounts? Why not just signup for a team account and play as a team?
alok-g 13y ago
The quality of higher education in India is just bad (I am originally from India) making it more about the degree* than about education itself. Given this, copying assignments is rampant as it is an economically sensible step to getting the degree (without having to also getting the education). A part of the problem is also that the professors themselves are barely good (as such I come from a very reputed engineering college) to provide quality education for those who actually care about it. Students had no trust on the course syllabus itself. So they would copy the assignments for the degree, and if interested, would pursue self-study for the education. A student in my session once remarked that these colleges are still very reputed because ultimately the students coming out of the colleges are still very good. This is not because of the college though -- The students going "in" have to be extremely good in the entrance exams to get into the college* . Based on the advice a relative gave me, I balanced my efforts between the degree and education (given the two do not overlap as much) to maintain just average grades in college purposefully. If my grades in the last semester were better than the average, I would reduce my degree/assignments effort while increasing my education efforts studying in the college library. I do not think this is limited to India though. I was teaching assistant for a course at a reputed US university, and found a programming assignment for a group of 17 oriental students to be exactly the same. So it was clear that only one of them had actually done it. Until I found that one of the students did not even remove the original author's name from the assignment (!) and this name was none of the 17! Another incidence I recall from the same US university is when some 38 out of 40 students were proven to have copied the assignments. The explanation the teaching assistant gave to the professor was that it was not a good idea to have an assignment due just two days before the final exams. PS: I am not suggesting of course that cheating in the Code Jam is justified by any means. Just trying to explain where the cheating culture is coming from. * Keep in mind the significantly higher population as well as population density in India as compared to say the US, which amongst other things makes the market very competitive.
- namityadav 13y ago
  You do not want to use that term. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#American_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#American_English
plinkplonk 13y ago
Original Source:http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coders_found_cheating_in_google_code_jam/ http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coder... The submission's url just has some editorial fluff that doesn't say anything useful and has no extra information. Would be a shame to give them the traffic for essentially cut paste + crappy commentary.
crimsonzagar 13y ago
From what it seems, problem of corruption in India is not limited to the Government or big corps alone. It is a deep seated cultural issue, at grass roots level, in the tiniest of day-to-day transactions and actions. And I am afraid to say it starts with the proud claim of calling everything a jugaad [1] in the first place - a hack or easy way out which lends to itself a cheap name. While a portion of jugaad, a prideful hack, is certainly useful and of positive kind, but there is a significant negative portion of it, the one which is unhealthy from karma/long-term-impact point of view, that is rampant in Indian subcontinent. It's a mess. And I believe the main reason for shrinking competitiveness and resources of the place. [1] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3041%22 http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=304...
- virtualmic 13y ago
  You are the first person whom I have encountered who acknowledges the grass-root and "common man" level of corruption in India. In the last 5 years or so, I am finding this corruption becoming even more widespread even, as you rightly pointed out, in the tiniest of the day-to-day transactions!
  - crimsonzagar 13y ago
    Thank you virtualmic, yes karma is what I figured our country is poor at. We have an extremely poor karma. To put it simply, most of us are running after marks and grade points during our school age, and easy money and promotions and boot-licking after that. There are only few who ever thought of doing it the right way, working hard or even voting the right people to power. Everyone else only expects things to work, and yet does it the jugaad way cursing everyone else on the way. I'd say the collective karma of our nation is broken; and where ever it has, things have imploded or gone for worse as we can already witness. Look at any community or country out there, it's always the fundamentals that make or break its destiny.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ishansharma 13y ago
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.
- vignesh_vs_in 13y ago
  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 ;) .
  - ishansharma 13y ago
    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!
swampthing 13y ago
To all the Indians here who are saying collusion / cheating is deeply ingrained in the culture - I'm just curious, is this true at IITs as well? Those schools are generally well-regarded, so I'd be interested to hear what things are like there.
- ishansharma 13y ago
  +1 Though someone in the comments is hinting that they are from IIT BHU and confirmed this thing in their college. I won't be surprised at all if IITs have same thing. Whiles many people are there who understand concepts, I don't think all are learning after so much mugging up in entrance exams.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    These days IIT's are about two things. First- A good brand to have on your resume. Second- If you don't get a good offer during campus hiring. You basically drop out, give CAT and then apply for an MBA so that you can now get a better offer at the end of your MBA. And so that you can probably go and work at some investment bank in the US. In short, its all about job offers and placements and has very little to do with whatever 'changing the world' thing we are all thinking or have heard about.
    - ishansharma 13y ago
      That's a sad thing. I wonder what effect this will have on India in long term!
      - crimsonzagar 13y ago
        What's interesting is that none of the IITians have spoken on this thread. You guys called it a goat and then wow'ed to say oh man see it is goat. That sounds so much like pure jealousy. If there is anything that has ever worked in education system of India - it is the IITs. That's one place which certainly has good karma, and I am proud about it. The question - is there cheating in internal exams of IITs? Check out Harvard in 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
prezjordan 13y ago
Pretty frustrating to read this. Question for HN: Many CodeJam competitors (this is not limited to CodeJam, though) do these competitions so often that they essentially have a library of similar problems and solutions to reference. In which case, a top competitor can identify a similar problem, copy the source code from his previous solution, and slightly modify it to the problem's specifics. Is this considered cheating? It's incredibly frustrating for a competitor like me - who makes it into Round 2 by the skin of his teeth (rank 768 in round 1A) - to see the top guys (whose names I recognize!) finish problems in minutes. Is it possible for them to just be that fast? Maybe, but it's well-known that many copy solutions from previous problems.
- GilbertErik 13y ago
  I see an interesting point in this: How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost? I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?
- rfurmani 13y ago
  This is a comment that often comes up, but rest assured the top competitors really are that fast from scratch. There are some screencasts floating around of Petr competing in Toocoder SRMs, and you can also look at the timings on I site Topcoder and ACM competitions, where there really is no copy and paste. That said, one does end up memorizing some things with practice. For example, after having to code it up a few times it is easy to get a nice short implementation of network flow that you can type in in 2 minutes or so.
realrocker 13y ago
In their defense they probably thought that it would get them better wives.heh.
- illuminate 13y ago
  How is that funny?
  - realrocker 13y ago
    Ouch. Not even sarcastic?
songgao 13y ago
I've been a TA for Matlab course in my university for three semesters and there are a lot of students cheating in assignments. I thought it would be interesting to see how different submissions are grouped into clustered so I made a visualization page (and a bunch of scripts). Turns out that there are quite a few clusters even the similarity threshold is set to be 90%. https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions I wonder what it's gonna be like in Google Code Jam submissions. Although alike submissions don't necessarily imply cheating.
- nijk 13y ago
  Haha: "Students, to pass this class, analyze submissions in MATLAB, and write a report implicating the copiers."
  - songgao 13y ago
    That's a nice idea!
sudhirj 13y ago
There is a problem, but I'd think twice before calling it collusion or cheating. Here in India the social norms are a little different - when you talk about classmates, groups of friends, teams and gangs, the failures and successes of one are the failures and successes of all. Some examples: * I had two friends back in college, making us a gang of three. If two of us did well on a particular subject and the third didn't, we'd get called over to his place by his mum, where she'd beg us to teach him and help him out. Home cooked food was a very common and effective bribe. * At our first job interview on campus, we told the interviewer that we were all three joining the company, or none of us would. All three of us got in. * One of us having a girlfriend when the other two didn't meant he was an asshole. Two of us being hitched meant we were obligated to move heaven and earth to help out the third guy. * Each of us would do one third of the coursework, and we'd coach the others on it and learn the rest. This also applied to individual work - we'd just split it in three parts and share all of it. * At the final year project / thesis, we did collude. I was freelancing at the time, and I managed to land an interesting project building a case handling / lifecycle system for a client. I put that design forward as my final year project, and listed the other two as my "team members". We all got top marks. Do I regret this? No, not really. These guys were my friends. People called us the Three Musketeers, and I sure as hell wasn't going to leave either of them behind. And they would have (and did) the same for me. Would we still do it if it was illegal? I don't know. Maybe. Now, ten years down the line, we've all gone our separate ways. There is still pressure, though. Two of us are married, and if and when we meet the third's parents, we will hang our heads in shame. We didn't help find him a wife. Odd, but true.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- joyeuse6701 13y ago
  if code jam restricts the sharing of code (come up with your own answers individually, emphasis on your, own, and individually), then three competitors with the same verbatim code is cheating. The test is not designed to cater and IMO should not cater to a particular culture, it is I believe, designed to be a means of identifying individuals of a skillset. Unfortunately the title of this begins with 'Indian' which suddenly shifts the emphasis on their origin and not that fact that there was alleged cheating. If we were to remove 'Indian' from the title, this post and mine responding to it, wouldn't be all that relevant, which kind of speaks to the sensationalism of the bit and why it is so popular especially in the technical community. So, now what I really want to know is, for those that did submit their code, what they were thinking. Most people who intend to cheat try to obfuscate the code to hide detection. Another possibility was just being rash and hoping that it was an automated service that didn't really look at the code so much as the output. Another possibility, if we do take into account cultural norms, they didn't think there was anything wrong about posting the same answer. In either case, a lesson was learned.
sudhirj 13y ago
It's also odd how no one seems to be asking why GCJ doesn't allow teams. On one level this is also participants forcing teams into a system that doesn't support it.
ameyakarve 13y ago
I can attest that it is a very cultural thing in India. Ethically, it becomes a question like everyone else is doing it, so it isn't cheating; When I started with university, I had tried to make it a point to do my assignments by myself. Yet, it became the case that I spent more time and got worse grades that most people around. I continued with this for a while, until the point where I stopped giving a fuck about my grades; I have used someone else's work ever since. It is a lot like what Lance Armstrong said about the cycling doping scandal. It is wrong, but not unfair; Unfortunately, this is the way it works.
ColinWright 13y ago
Currently doesn't load for me, but the http (as opposed to https) version does: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-cheating-in-google-code-jam-297/ http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-chea...

62 points by jayadevan 13y ago

This is shocking. I'm competing in Code Jam, and it's nice to think that everyone is interested in playing fair. If you're not capable of solving the problems at this stage, you won't be capable of solving them at the later stages either, so in that respect I don't really see the point in cheating. All it really means is that a few of the borderline-qualifying competitors missed out. EDIT: Might be interesting to download everybody's round 1B solutions and look for similarity. I'm going to attempt to do this now. EDIT2: Boy, Google sure don't make it easy to download everybody's solutions...

testbro 13y ago
This behaviour was common in the last Facebook Hacker Cup too. Most of the announcements of rounds starting included discussion of (and in some cases links to) solutions. I guess it's part and parcel - I think Facebook did take action against obvious plagiarisers. If not, the later rounds will weed out the cheaters in any case.
- fmax30 13y ago
  I think you are missing the point here , instead of 3 cheaters three honest coders could have qualified to the next round , which would in turn give them the chance for competing in round 2 and round 3.
  - zplesivcak 13y ago
    If someone barely missed passing through 1st round, chance for him to make it through any of the following rounds is practically non-existant. Exception being if he's experienced competitor who fell short for some reason.
    - SteveGerencser 13y ago
      So what you are saying is that since they may not have had a chance to win it's okay that someone cheating got ahead of them?
      - jstanley 13y ago
        I understand zplesivcak's point. While it is lame that cheating is going on, it doesn't really impact the overall winner of the contest. Also, for the last 3 spots out of 1000, there is a lot of luck involved anyway.
        djKianoosh 13y ago
        you assume a lot there with "last" 3 spots.
        jstanley 13y ago
        Well, it will only be the last 3 spots that are (substantially) affected by 3 cheaters - everybody else either qualified or failed to qualify anyway. And the luck I'm referring to is in timing. If you look at the scoreboard for round 1B, 1000th place scored 34 points and a time of 1:30:38. 1001st place 34 points and a time of 1:30:48. That 10 seconds is nothing if not luck.
    - fmax30 13y ago
      Imagine this scenario ,It is round 1C . A talented programmer started competing there are only 20 minutes to go. He solves the Small and Large test cases for Problem A ,and only the small for problem C. But Alas ! his rank is 1002 , he doesn't qualify even though on topcoder he is in the top 200's.
      - jstanley 13y ago
        He took a huge risk by starting with only 20 minutes to go. I would say his failure there lies more with himself than with the 3 cheaters.

jgunsch 13y ago

Aside: Why "Indian coders" and not just "Three coders"? Would this have ever been titled "white coders found cheating"? I know this isn't the point of the article, but I wonder if, on HN, we should consider clipping "gratuitous adjectives" in titles that contribute to perpetuating dominant systems.

paulhauggis 13y ago
So we are going to ban facts now? The problem is that it does seem to be cultural. In every one of my computer science classes, students from India almost always shared answers on the test, copied each others' homework, and felt there was no problem with it.
- Sven7 13y ago
  I always wonder what happens to all these honest Americans once they get into Wall Street. Or these days Silicon Valley where keeping people addicted to social feeds and video streams is making an honest living. Let not even talk about the guys who sold the rest of the world on WMD's.
  - illuminate 13y ago
    "I always wonder what happens to all these honest Americans once they get into Wall Street." The rest probably get filtered out well before reaching that point.
  - paulhauggis 13y ago
    2 wrongs don't make a right. If we choose to ignore a problem that continues to happen because we want to be more PC, it will never stop.
deletes 13y ago
They are from the country named India. Thus Indian coders. Color has nothing to do with it. If they were from America the title would not have been white coders but American coders.

GuiA 13y ago

Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures? I distinctly remember my grad school classes, where even by getting 95% I'd be dead last in the class rankings because all the Chinese/Indian students would get 98/99/100% on their assignments. I didn't really care about it, figuring that their studying habits were much more diligent than mine, until one time I arrived in the classroom 45 minutes early and found out a sizable proportion of them were merrily exchanging answers and copying off of each other. I then learned that it was something they would do pretty much every single time. (of course, it was not all of them– a few were hard workers who went by the rules. But in all of my classes, the majority of students from those cultures would operate in such a manner). So I'm wondering– is this purely selection bias, or is collusion just more acceptable in certain cultures? The US (and most of Europe) heavily penalizes it at all levels of education, but I wonder if it's the case everywhere in the world.

obviouslygreen 13y ago
Given all the anecdotes around here offering the same experience, I'm interested in this too. If it is a cultural thing, I'd say two things: 1. It makes sense. A lot of sense. In the real world, it's far more useful to be able to collaborate effectively than to always adopt an adversarial or competitive attitude. 2. It should be addressed openly. Personally, I think a more collaborative environment would help a lot of us in a lot of ways, but sometimes that's just not how things are supposed to be done (e.g. assignments and tests in most US schools); in that case, everyone might be a little more aware and happy if it were clear up front -- in very multi-cultural situations -- what the expectations are regarding individual work. Of course, that won't stop everyone, and it doesn't address every problem, but making everyone aware of the differences could stop a lot of misunderstanding and, potentially, what's technically cheating even though that may not be the intent. [edit: Of course, some people do just plain cheat, knowingly and willfully; this is not intended to excuse that behavior, which is crap and should be punished.]
- jstanley 13y ago
  I think the Code Jam incident is an example of knowingly and willfully cheating. It is obvious that you are supposed to be competing individually. Even in the event that that isn't obvious, why signup for 3 accounts? Why not just signup for a team account and play as a team?

alok-g 13y ago

The quality of higher education in India is just bad (I am originally from India) making it more about the degree* than about education itself. Given this, copying assignments is rampant as it is an economically sensible step to getting the degree (without having to also getting the education). A part of the problem is also that the professors themselves are barely good (as such I come from a very reputed engineering college) to provide quality education for those who actually care about it. Students had no trust on the course syllabus itself. So they would copy the assignments for the degree, and if interested, would pursue self-study for the education. A student in my session once remarked that these colleges are still very reputed because ultimately the students coming out of the colleges are still very good. This is not because of the college though -- The students going "in" have to be extremely good in the entrance exams to get into the college* . Based on the advice a relative gave me, I balanced my efforts between the degree and education (given the two do not overlap as much) to maintain just average grades in college purposefully. If my grades in the last semester were better than the average, I would reduce my degree/assignments effort while increasing my education efforts studying in the college library. I do not think this is limited to India though. I was teaching assistant for a course at a reputed US university, and found a programming assignment for a group of 17 oriental students to be exactly the same. So it was clear that only one of them had actually done it. Until I found that one of the students did not even remove the original author's name from the assignment (!) and this name was none of the 17! Another incidence I recall from the same US university is when some 38 out of 40 students were proven to have copied the assignments. The explanation the teaching assistant gave to the professor was that it was not a good idea to have an assignment due just two days before the final exams. PS: I am not suggesting of course that cheating in the Code Jam is justified by any means. Just trying to explain where the cheating culture is coming from. * Keep in mind the significantly higher population as well as population density in India as compared to say the US, which amongst other things makes the market very competitive.

namityadav 13y ago
You do not want to use that term. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#American_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#American_English

plinkplonk 13y ago

Original Source:http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coders_found_cheating_in_google_code_jam/ http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coder... The submission's url just has some editorial fluff that doesn't say anything useful and has no extra information. Would be a shame to give them the traffic for essentially cut paste + crappy commentary.

crimsonzagar 13y ago

From what it seems, problem of corruption in India is not limited to the Government or big corps alone. It is a deep seated cultural issue, at grass roots level, in the tiniest of day-to-day transactions and actions. And I am afraid to say it starts with the proud claim of calling everything a jugaad [1] in the first place - a hack or easy way out which lends to itself a cheap name. While a portion of jugaad, a prideful hack, is certainly useful and of positive kind, but there is a significant negative portion of it, the one which is unhealthy from karma/long-term-impact point of view, that is rampant in Indian subcontinent. It's a mess. And I believe the main reason for shrinking competitiveness and resources of the place. [1] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3041%22 http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=304...

virtualmic 13y ago
You are the first person whom I have encountered who acknowledges the grass-root and "common man" level of corruption in India. In the last 5 years or so, I am finding this corruption becoming even more widespread even, as you rightly pointed out, in the tiniest of the day-to-day transactions!
- crimsonzagar 13y ago
  Thank you virtualmic, yes karma is what I figured our country is poor at. We have an extremely poor karma. To put it simply, most of us are running after marks and grade points during our school age, and easy money and promotions and boot-licking after that. There are only few who ever thought of doing it the right way, working hard or even voting the right people to power. Everyone else only expects things to work, and yet does it the jugaad way cursing everyone else on the way. I'd say the collective karma of our nation is broken; and where ever it has, things have imploded or gone for worse as we can already witness. Look at any community or country out there, it's always the fundamentals that make or break its destiny.
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ishansharma 13y ago

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.

vignesh_vs_in 13y ago
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 ;) .
- ishansharma 13y ago
  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!

swampthing 13y ago

To all the Indians here who are saying collusion / cheating is deeply ingrained in the culture - I'm just curious, is this true at IITs as well? Those schools are generally well-regarded, so I'd be interested to hear what things are like there.

ishansharma 13y ago
+1 Though someone in the comments is hinting that they are from IIT BHU and confirmed this thing in their college. I won't be surprised at all if IITs have same thing. Whiles many people are there who understand concepts, I don't think all are learning after so much mugging up in entrance exams.
- kamaal 13y ago
  These days IIT's are about two things. First- A good brand to have on your resume. Second- If you don't get a good offer during campus hiring. You basically drop out, give CAT and then apply for an MBA so that you can now get a better offer at the end of your MBA. And so that you can probably go and work at some investment bank in the US. In short, its all about job offers and placements and has very little to do with whatever 'changing the world' thing we are all thinking or have heard about.
  - ishansharma 13y ago
    That's a sad thing. I wonder what effect this will have on India in long term!
    - crimsonzagar 13y ago
      What's interesting is that none of the IITians have spoken on this thread. You guys called it a goat and then wow'ed to say oh man see it is goat. That sounds so much like pure jealousy. If there is anything that has ever worked in education system of India - it is the IITs. That's one place which certainly has good karma, and I am proud about it. The question - is there cheating in internal exams of IITs? Check out Harvard in 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal

prezjordan 13y ago

Pretty frustrating to read this. Question for HN: Many CodeJam competitors (this is not limited to CodeJam, though) do these competitions so often that they essentially have a library of similar problems and solutions to reference. In which case, a top competitor can identify a similar problem, copy the source code from his previous solution, and slightly modify it to the problem's specifics. Is this considered cheating? It's incredibly frustrating for a competitor like me - who makes it into Round 2 by the skin of his teeth (rank 768 in round 1A) - to see the top guys (whose names I recognize!) finish problems in minutes. Is it possible for them to just be that fast? Maybe, but it's well-known that many copy solutions from previous problems.

GilbertErik 13y ago
I see an interesting point in this: How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost? I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?
rfurmani 13y ago
This is a comment that often comes up, but rest assured the top competitors really are that fast from scratch. There are some screencasts floating around of Petr competing in Toocoder SRMs, and you can also look at the timings on I site Topcoder and ACM competitions, where there really is no copy and paste. That said, one does end up memorizing some things with practice. For example, after having to code it up a few times it is easy to get a nice short implementation of network flow that you can type in in 2 minutes or so.

realrocker 13y ago

In their defense they probably thought that it would get them better wives.heh.

illuminate 13y ago
How is that funny?
- realrocker 13y ago
  Ouch. Not even sarcastic?

songgao 13y ago

I've been a TA for Matlab course in my university for three semesters and there are a lot of students cheating in assignments. I thought it would be interesting to see how different submissions are grouped into clustered so I made a visualization page (and a bunch of scripts). Turns out that there are quite a few clusters even the similarity threshold is set to be 90%. https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions I wonder what it's gonna be like in Google Code Jam submissions. Although alike submissions don't necessarily imply cheating.

nijk 13y ago
Haha: "Students, to pass this class, analyze submissions in MATLAB, and write a report implicating the copiers."
- songgao 13y ago
  That's a nice idea!

sudhirj 13y ago

There is a problem, but I'd think twice before calling it collusion or cheating. Here in India the social norms are a little different - when you talk about classmates, groups of friends, teams and gangs, the failures and successes of one are the failures and successes of all. Some examples: * I had two friends back in college, making us a gang of three. If two of us did well on a particular subject and the third didn't, we'd get called over to his place by his mum, where she'd beg us to teach him and help him out. Home cooked food was a very common and effective bribe. * At our first job interview on campus, we told the interviewer that we were all three joining the company, or none of us would. All three of us got in. * One of us having a girlfriend when the other two didn't meant he was an asshole. Two of us being hitched meant we were obligated to move heaven and earth to help out the third guy. * Each of us would do one third of the coursework, and we'd coach the others on it and learn the rest. This also applied to individual work - we'd just split it in three parts and share all of it. * At the final year project / thesis, we did collude. I was freelancing at the time, and I managed to land an interesting project building a case handling / lifecycle system for a client. I put that design forward as my final year project, and listed the other two as my "team members". We all got top marks. Do I regret this? No, not really. These guys were my friends. People called us the Three Musketeers, and I sure as hell wasn't going to leave either of them behind. And they would have (and did) the same for me. Would we still do it if it was illegal? I don't know. Maybe. Now, ten years down the line, we've all gone our separate ways. There is still pressure, though. Two of us are married, and if and when we meet the third's parents, we will hang our heads in shame. We didn't help find him a wife. Odd, but true.

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joyeuse6701 13y ago
if code jam restricts the sharing of code (come up with your own answers individually, emphasis on your, own, and individually), then three competitors with the same verbatim code is cheating. The test is not designed to cater and IMO should not cater to a particular culture, it is I believe, designed to be a means of identifying individuals of a skillset. Unfortunately the title of this begins with 'Indian' which suddenly shifts the emphasis on their origin and not that fact that there was alleged cheating. If we were to remove 'Indian' from the title, this post and mine responding to it, wouldn't be all that relevant, which kind of speaks to the sensationalism of the bit and why it is so popular especially in the technical community. So, now what I really want to know is, for those that did submit their code, what they were thinking. Most people who intend to cheat try to obfuscate the code to hide detection. Another possibility was just being rash and hoping that it was an automated service that didn't really look at the code so much as the output. Another possibility, if we do take into account cultural norms, they didn't think there was anything wrong about posting the same answer. In either case, a lesson was learned.

sudhirj 13y ago

It's also odd how no one seems to be asking why GCJ doesn't allow teams. On one level this is also participants forcing teams into a system that doesn't support it.

ameyakarve 13y ago

I can attest that it is a very cultural thing in India. Ethically, it becomes a question like everyone else is doing it, so it isn't cheating; When I started with university, I had tried to make it a point to do my assignments by myself. Yet, it became the case that I spent more time and got worse grades that most people around. I continued with this for a while, until the point where I stopped giving a fuck about my grades; I have used someone else's work ever since. It is a lot like what Lance Armstrong said about the cycling doping scandal. It is wrong, but not unfair; Unfortunately, this is the way it works.

ColinWright 13y ago

Currently doesn't load for me, but the http (as opposed to https) version does: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-cheating-in-google-code-jam-297/ http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-chea...