Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?

Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures?<p>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.<p>(of course, it was not <i>all</i> 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).<p>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.

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.<p>Some examples:<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Odd, but true.

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.

This is shocking.<p>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.<p>All it really means is that a few of the borderline-qualifying competitors missed out.<p>EDIT: Might be interesting to download everybody's round 1B solutions and look for similarity. I'm going to attempt to do this now.<p>EDIT2: Boy, Google sure don't make it easy to download everybody's solutions...

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.<p>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* .<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>* 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.

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.<p>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.<p>Other people who copied it all and shied crappy command line "hospital management system" and other things scored way higher than me.<p>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.

Original Source:<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coders_found_cheating_in_google_code_jam/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coder...</a><p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3041%22" rel="nofollow">http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=304...</a>

Pretty frustrating to read this.<p>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.<p>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 <i>minutes</i>. Is it possible for them to just be that fast? Maybe, but it's well-known that many copy solutions from previous problems.

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.

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.

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%.<p><a href="https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions</a><p>I wonder what it's gonna be like in Google Code Jam submissions. Although alike submissions don't necessarily imply cheating.

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

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.

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