Please remove the partial grading system in long contests.

OK, understand this. Partial grading allows for contestants to know whether their approach is entirely wrong or only on corner cases. This way, people tend to think less and, consequently, lose out on improving your debugging skills. Then, as one of the posters wrote, many inappropriate solutions pass because you get an idea of the test cases. Lastly, beginners tend to get satisfied with partial points and don’t make the effort of scouring the internet for answers. In all, it is of no good except the fact that contestants just practice naive algos.

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@betlista I couldn’t have “hacked” If the verdict for each each task was not shown.

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but why should a contest allow something like this. A good contest is capable of preventing such a thing. isn’t it?

why to give a chance of hacking !!!

At one point of time when you are really frustrated getting WA’s, even good coders may be tempted to “hack” …
there should be no mean of hacking(like in previous contests)… A good coder must know how to handle this frustration and come out with the opt solution in difficult situations all by himself !!!

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For example on CodeForces this is not working well - when there is contest for div 2 only few div 1 coders participate and that ruins the contest and makes it difficult to advance from div 2 to div 1.

I think it’s a very good initiative taken by codechef team by introducing partial grading system. I myself felt very motivated to get full points in the FNCS by trying so many times. By this i was able to know that my approach was right, giving right answer but was not the optimized one. So it helps the beginners and motivates them to try more and more so they can earn full points for the problem. This time i tried to attempt and solve the question that i would have left by seeing its acceptance rate in the old system. So i think it’s good for the beginners. There are some drawbacks of the system like we are now not able to judge the problem complexity by seeing its accept rate and some others related to ranking. This may take time , we should give chance to codechef team to work on it. I’m sure that they will definitely come up with some solution.

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there are many other major problems you overlooked. One of them is the problem of hacking.

Ok, but we are talking about two different things here - one is, that there is partial grading and another is, that information for which test case you solution failed is visible, and the later is the problem, not the partial grading…

As I wrote in comment for this answer, problem is, that one can see which test cases failed, it’s not partial grading problem.

yes … certainly!!!
failed test cases must not be shown(it only promotes hacking) … partial grading is okay …

In Fombitorial, if there weren’t any partial grading, perhaps, I wouldn’t have attempted it… But now, I know what Fermat little’s theorem is and I could get 40 points! :slight_smile: (Learning something new and getting more points because of it, feels really awesome) Partial grading helps :slight_smile:

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Even if you would have attempted the full problem you would have learnt of Fermat anyway, and much more. I don’t see how having points for naive solutions makes people attempt those parts of the problem which they otherwise won’t.

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yes I completely back the idea that a partially solved question must not appear in the solved section of profile of a codechef user.
Moreover, I will suggest that partial marking should me removed when contest’s problems are introduced in practice arena,I think when someone is practising ,he must solve fully.

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My view is completely different to most. Keep the partial grading and remove the easy 4 problems. Everyone gets something to play with. :stuck_out_tongue:

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What you could have tried is to divide the tasks into subtasks and show subtask-specific information upon each submit. But, one would get score (1 point per problem) for a problem, only if all subtasks pass. (Hard-earned points!!!)

For folks who want to try harder problems, they can still get ideas on how and where they should optimize, but, unless and until they reach the final destination, no points.

Thoughts?

Disclaimer: Personal opinion.

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@betlista I’m agree with you. One should only be able to see the test cases for which his/her answer is accepted. Otherwise only error should be displayed as WA,TLE etc…like in old system. Detailed information regarding test cases should not be displayed.