Wrongly Penalised

I recieved a mail today that I was penalised for cheating in Oct Long Challenge. These were the two solutions they considered cheated.

https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/8463734
https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/8309201

The second one is mine. The question is this.
First of all, I have never attempted to cheat. The second guy is not even from my country. I have not made the code public online. Plus, the question was so easy that I don’t think I could possible copy someone.

I want my ratings restored.

I think you have a case. Both codes are quite similar, so it’s understandable that an automatic code checker flags them as duplicate. OTOH the applied algorithm is so simple that such similar submissions are to be expected since that’s the way to write it.

AFAIK there should be an email address in the email you got where you can state your case in order to have it reconsidered.

3 Likes

I have mailed them, and they are looking into it. Does commenting my name in the source code reduce chances for such flags?

I hope not :). This would make cheating quite easy. I don’t know about the internals of the algorithm, but I would assume it doesn’t care about different comments at all.

It’s the natural limit of automatic plagiarism detection. For this problem I simply can’t think of any way to produce thousands of sufficiently distinct solutions. So false positives will have a high probability.

Exactly. Hope they do reconsider my case. Thanks again!

I too was wrongly penalized this time for my submission to the problem WDTBAM

  1. My submission: https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/8467842
  2. Other: https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/8310972

This problem had over 4500 submissions and was the 2nd easiest problem in the challenge. The only reason my code came under the scanner was because this other individual and I use the same ‘Fast IO template’ in JAVA which occupies most of the space in the code. Also, this template is used my many worldwide.

I made a submission on 9th Oct whereas he made it on 2nd.
Also, all our variable names as well as coding styles are visibly different.

I really hope Codechef replies to the 2 emails I have sent them ASAP and restores my ratings. I have fully analyzed the code and sent the same to them in the email.

Trust me, It feels pretty pathetic when you’re wrongly penalized and the wait for their reply kills you even more.

bhai ab kuch ni ho sakta best of luck for the next time…
september challenge main mere sath bhi uch aisa hi hua tha…don’t worry look forward… :slight_smile: