Thanks to a user’s confession, I came to realize why many users got same point (0.735) to the problem FAULT in April’s contest. I checked that some users submitted same code (They did not even try to change any letter!) Although I did not check all submissions, it is certain that few users cheated. (Try to check few solutions whose point is 0.735, http://www.codechef.com/APRIL13/problems/FAULT/)
All users should keep their honor code and rules, If we want to be acknowledged to be good coders. Cheating will make the efforts of people who are trying to make this site better in vain. The more cheating, the less people do believe the authority of this site.
Although I agree with everything you wrote, I sincerely advise you to not worry too much about the cheaters that are “lurking” around here…
Firstly, because, more or less efficientely, measures are taken or will be taken to identify and ban the cheaters… and secondly, well, as you well put, they all scored 0.735, which means that they got quite far from the very best honest solution… And if they really did only copied and pasted the code, it will be their own loss since they won’t gain absolutely nothing by doing such thing… They might be happy with an extra 0.735 points NOW, but those kind of cheats never resist to a new problem and to time…
If they copied, they won’t learn anything that’s actually useful for them in terms of accquired knowledge, and, to be honest, isn’t the fun of these contests to be able to improve and learn new things in a slow, methodical and honest way?
Isn’t the joy of enlightment or discovery of a new concept infinitely many times better than a green tick? In my opinion, it sure is!!
So, I advise anyone who reads this to stick to the honest way and the gains will be infinitely more valuable than a bunch of extra points, trust me!!
I also would like to applaude once again the user who got the courage to stand up and confess the cheatings done, it is the first step towards improvement
In my opinion, the only way to stop these kinds of cheating is that CodeChef has to be really harsh, ie to disqualify both the ones who made solutions public and the ones who copied. This will encourage participants to use private mode when they want to test solutions on ideone for example.
Yes I do agree but we as other coders should not be too much bothered about it
The main purpose and motive of CodeChef long challenges is to help people learn something new.
That is why i feel there is no count of WA/TLE since everyone learns from his/her mistakes. So the persons doing malpractices are doing at their own loss. If they had coded the code themselves they MUST have learned atleast some small thing. Even debugging your own code teaches something. And what will they achieve by getting a good rank, what matters in the end is to learn something and enhance our knowledge.
