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Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

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Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#51

Post by nijk »

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:/…

You school didn't have study groups with Americans?

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#52

Post by nijk »

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…

You seem to be saying you had graded (with grades that went somewhere on a transcript that matterd) problem sets in grad school. That is a rather antiquated concept, even for undergrad..

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#53

Post by nijk »

octref wrote: post #44
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…

The trivial solution to homewt cheating is to stop the worthless practice of assigning and grading duplicate homework. Assign unique projects, or don't grade mass homework, so incentives don't get misaligned.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#54

Post by nijk »

songgao wrote: post #49

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 wo…

Haha: "Students, to pass this class, analyze submissions in MATLAB, and write a report implicating the copiers."

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#55

Post by nijk »

jgunsch wrote: post #50
deletes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the host were not an American company, perhaps. Not all news is world news, though

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#56

Post by nijk »

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…

Highest compliment I ever got from a teacher: "You got then highest score of everyone who didn't cheat."

I think that knowing that he knew that they cheated and I didn't, that meant something that lasted more than that the artificial confines of that one class.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#57

Post by rfurmani »

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…

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.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#58

Post by nijk »

alok-g wrote: post #42
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 ver…

Wasted opportunity! Open source it, and send everyone a link. Including the professor.

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#59

Post by nl »

rayiner wrote: post #28
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…

> 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?

I don't think there is any relationship between the location of a country and corruption.

Japan, Hong Kong and especially Singapore are rated as some of the least corrupt countries on earth[1], ahead of both the US and the UK.

(South) Korea rates roughly the same as most of Europe, while China & Sri Lanka are roughly the same as Italy (hmm).

India & Thailand were rated roughly the same as Greece.

There seems to be a much closer (if still rough) correlation between a combination of GDP/capita and press freedom.

[1] http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results

Re: Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

#60

Post by dhimes »

nijk wrote: post #51
dhimes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

You school didn't have study groups with Americans?

No. Such things were unheard of. As a professor I tried to institute them, but two things worked hard against it. (1) It was a commuter school, so getting people together outside of class was very difficult, as they didn't reside there and they had other places to be. (2) The concept of what to do in a study group was completely foreign. The social pressure to 'behave,' that is, be a good group member, do your share, and so on, wasn't particularly strong. In effect, like a lot of things, it benefited those who least needed the benefit. It also hurt them (they were often the same people who had important other stuff to attend to). Once it went from mandatory to optional, it died.
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