Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

nextbigwhat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 100 posts

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#41

Post by GilbertErik »

prezjordan wrote: post #38

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 cheat…

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?

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#42

Post by alok-g »

ishansharma wrote: post #33

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…

I recall being in a similar situation. I had done significant marketing/PR for my project and that helped me avoid this issue. Since mine was an original project (a rare phenomenon), it was not very difficult to get the project famous amongst other students and then the professors.

The students in the next semester started asking me for the project files to copy it for submission as their own project. I had to be very polite to not give while maintaining my relationship with them.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#43

Post by ishansharma »

vignesh_vs_in wrote: post #35
ishansharma wrote: post #33

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…

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…

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!

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#44

Post by octref »

GuiA wrote: post #5

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 f…

I'm an international student from China, and now I'm TAing a CS intro class in an US university(it's ranked top 30).

I found many Chinese students cheating and am not surprised, but what surprised me was that many US students cheated as well. Since I'm from China I know very well the kind of collusion culture : people care their grades too much and make mistakes. However, from what I have heard, US universities have strict policy against cheating, and students from US generally don't cheat.

To put it into figure: 15 out of 60 cheated, and 4 are Chinese while 9 are from US. I'm really disappointed as my college is even ranked top 30, and this changed my impression about US colleges. I'm transferring out to an ivy and hope there won't be much cheating in these prestigious ivies, but then Harvard Cheating Scandal came.

Now I feel really bad about US. I thought it is a place where ingenuity and honesty are upheld most.. Sigh.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

pitiburi wrote: post #36
rayiner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures? What do you think is the basis for the pervasive government corruption in asian countries? Do you think it's just a matter of coincidence?

Are you then implying that there is no corruption in the USA?

[deleted]

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#46

Post by crimsonzagar »

virtualmic wrote: post #39
crimsonzagar wrote: post #22

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 pride…

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!

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.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#48

Post by Simucal »

dhimes wrote: post #27
GuiA wrote: post #5

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 f…

When I was a grad student (in America) a couple of decades ago, I was involved in two seminars/roundtable discussions that stayed with me. One was on sexual harassment- I'll save that for another thread. The other was a cultural awareness 'sharing.' For context, this was around the time of the Anita Hill testimony regarding Clarence Thomas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Hill and the Tianaman Square protest http:/…

I think there needs to be a distinction between collaborating to understand something as a group and directly copying answers verbatim from others.

I felt like GuiA was describing the latter and while you are describing the former.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#49

Post by songgao »

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

I wonder what it's gonna be like in Google Code Jam submissions. Although alike submissions don't necessarily imply cheating.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#50

Post by jgunsch »

deletes wrote: post #8
jgunsch wrote: post #4

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.

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.

I can absolutely accept that distinction. Do you think "American coders" would have been the title if that were the case?
Post reply on HN