
Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam? - jayadevan
https://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-cheating-in-google-code-jam-297/
======
GuiA
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.

~~~
dhimes
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989)

So sexual harassment and multicultural diversity were on the country's mind.

The department had a cultural awareness discussion centered on an exchange
between the American graduate students and the recently arrived Chinese
graduate students.

To my astonishment, the Chinese saw us American students as unfriendly, always
retreating and 'sticking to our own kind.' They found it very hard to connect
with us, much as they wanted to. It was because of the way we worked. When
American students got their homework or assignment, we went to our desk and
worked on it. We did the readings alone, we turned in the problems that we
worked alone, and had very little discussion about the matter. We approached
the courses individually, and this put the Chinese students off.

It put them off because they were very much about _community_. They discussed
the lectures and reading until _every single one of them_ understood it. They
lived and died together. If homework was supposed to be individual work, then
they did it individually- but they collaborated heavily on everything up until
the point of homework- and they made sure everybody knew the concepts, math,
etc. for doing the homework.

This is a very efficient way of learning new material. In fact, I've read in
TIMS studies (or, books about the studies like 'The Teaching Gap' and 'The
Learning Gap') that this is the asian way of teaching and learning in lower
grades as well. There was less of an emphasis on (or, perhaps better, less of
a _recognition_ of) individual talent as being the basis of success in school,
and more of a culture of "we can all get this together, if you can't it's
because you are unwilling to work."

So I am not at all surprised that you observed heavy collaboration- I would be
disappointed, however, if you saw deliberate 'cheating.' I can sympathise that
people who don't fathom the concept of individuality in learning may struggle
to understand the line between what we accept as cheating and not cheating.
But that is not to say that they don't, and cheat anyway.

~~~
Simucal
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.

~~~
dhimes
I feel as you do, but it's worth pointing out that if you come from a
different frame of reference you may not be observing what you think you are
observing. I can't say for sure in this case of course (hence how I ended my
post), but he may have seen, say, discussion (in a language he may not be
fluent in), showing each other papers, etc., yet may not have been seeing the
actual 'cloning' of homework answers. If you walked into a bunch of American
students doing this (but couldn't, for whatever reason), it's more natural to
assume that there is direct cloning involved.

But different cultures have different norms.

Let's say, for example, that problems 3, 4, and 7 are assigned. Now, problem 7
is a bitch, but shares some of the devilish details, perhaps the 'trick,' with
problem 6. Let's also assume that the course requirements are "You must do
your own work on homework." As a team, the group worked problem 6 together.
But one of the group was still struggling to complete problem 7 for homework.
He turns to his friend for help, and the friend replies "remember what we did
in problem 6? You do the same thing, but with two <whatevers> instead of one."

Is this cheating?

The direct help "with two <whatevers>" is getting close, but if you are from
another culture you may, honestly, think no. Because remember, your whole
understanding of education is about getting/doing whatever you need to do in
order to solve the problem. So you are going to judge rules differently than
someone whose first instinct is "this has to be my work only-- I'll fail all
by myself." (I hypothesize that this is part of the problem with international
IP laws as well.)

On a personal note, one the other side of the desk I was delighted when
students teamed up on homework and did extra. In fact, making solution manuals
available and publishing old exams was simply a sneaky way for me to get them
to do more work.

------
sudhirj
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.

~~~
joyeuse6701
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
We'd call this teamwork. It's understood that GCJ will try to find cloned
submissions, but for a lot of people telling them not to form teams simply
does not compute. It might be three guys sitting beside each other in a dorm
room or a lab, or it might be a team on chat. Either everyone knows they all
can't win first place, or maybe not any place. That's not the point. If you're
in a team, either everyone tries or no one does.

If this is what I think it is, the alternative would have been not to
participate at all. Because GCJ is a zero risk way to try something
challenging, why not give the team a go? More often than not, each member
might have tried different solutions or come in having read up on different
subjects.

~~~
canttestthis
You make it sound like Indians are mentally incapable of working alone (or
perhaps you're exaggerating for effect). Regardless, this is not the case. As
an Indian, I know that cheating is more accepted in India, but I've never
heard anyone delude themselves into calling it 'teamwork'.

~~~
sudhirj
I'm not generalizing - I'm sure there are plenty of Indians in that round who
played by the rules, and plenty who tried deliberately to cheat (besides the
ones who were actually caught). I'm saying that 'collusion' is thought of
differently here in a lot of circles.

------
jgunsch
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.

~~~
deletes
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.

~~~
jgunsch
I can absolutely accept that distinction. Do you think "American coders" would
have been the title if that were the case?

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

------
jstanley
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
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
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
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
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
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
you assume a lot there with "last" 3 spots.

~~~
jstanley
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.

------
alok-g
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.

~~~
kamaal
The biggest problem is you can't get into any elite institution by doing
"Learning the concept thing". There is far too much competition for marks and
too many people competing. The only way you can get in, is you have to mug up
and memorize everything by heart.

What's worst same thing continues every where.

Do you serious think, companies that come to hire look at how the candidates
work, Do they check if the guy is known as somebody who gets the work done?
They simply check if the guy knows some algorithms from the books. Or some
pointless puzzles, which can be gamed by practicing it for an hour a day.

This sort of thing works at all levels. It even works at some big web giants
like Google.

As a society we reward this kind of behavior lot. And then when we get it
back, why do we look so surprised?

~~~
alok-g
I wonder what is the solution.

Recommendations from former employers does not seem to work either. I have
some very good recommendations on my LinkedIn profile, but note that many dumb
people I knew also have great recommendations.

------
ishansharma
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
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
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!

------
plinkplonk
Original
Source:[http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coder...](http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1dpxc0/3_indian_coders_found_cheating_in_google_code_jam/)

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
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=304...](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3041%22)

~~~
virtualmic
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
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.

------
prezjordan
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.

~~~
rfurmani
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.

------
swampthing
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
+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
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
That's a sad thing. I wonder what effect this will have on India in long term!

~~~
crimsonzagar
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>

~~~
virtualmic
I am an IITian, specifically from IITB. I can say for sure that the level of
research in general is quite pathetic, except for one or two groups. The only
thing IITs used to be good were, (in their early and mid years) to gather some
good minds together and give them quite a bit of freedom and a nice
environment (in the hostels and such) so that they can discuss their ideas,
which they used to implement not while there in IIT, but after graduating.

However, in the recent years, the quality of these minds has become a bit
questionable (this is purely anecdotal, no concrete proofs). One thing is for
certain though, the amount of discussion which was there in years when each
hostel room did not have its own computer was quite high, which now in the age
of facebook and multiplayer games has reduced by a huge margin. As far as
copying assignments is concerned, that is a pretty common phenomenon in case
of general course assignments, unless one is really interested in that course
and wants to learn.

------
ameyakarve
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.

------
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.

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

~~~
songgao
That's a nice idea!

------
ColinWright
Currently doesn't load for me, but the http (as opposed to https) version
does:

[http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-
chea...](http://www.nextbigwhat.com/indian-developers-accused-of-cheating-in-
google-code-jam-297/)

------
sudhirj
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.

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

~~~
illuminate
How is that funny?

~~~
realrocker
Ouch. Not even sarcastic?

