Hello Community!
This post is made on behalf of @Ashishgup, @vivek_1998299, @SwetankModi and myself (@Abdullah768).
This post is about the contest UEMCO19 by University of Engineering & Management, New Town, Kolkata. The contest apparently had cash prize of 50K in total. (20K,12K,10K for top 3 and 1K for rank 4 to 10).
First of all, the problems were pathetic (half of them were directly copied). One of the problem statements was really ambigious. With external contests, these things are common but the really suprising part was that AFTER the contest had ended, they ADDED new test cases for the ambigious problem which resulted in our AC being turned into WA. You might wonder, what would be the reason to do such a thing?
At the end of the contest, the top 5 were:
- !(rating_diggers) - Me and @Vivek_1998299
- Bohat_hard - @Ashishgup and @Swetankmodi
- Apna Code Run Karega? - @indrajit111
- alright786 - @blake_786
- New Beginning - @anon44398224
Notice something about rank 3 and 5? They are both single memebered teams with rating of 2* (I don’t mean to disrespect beginners or anything but a single 2* membered team beating 2 x 6* membered teams? Rating system be like “Am I a joke to you?”). The guy @anon44398224 literally has submissions only on the contest date (Fake account much?). This was already suspicious enough but here’s what happenned next: The organisors added test cases where only our code would fail (#1 and #2), so that these accounts could win (The problem was so ambigious that you could choose any submission and easily generate test case to fail them). Since we opposed them, they created more test cases and failed some other teams code as well. Now, since their teams are at the top, they have finalised the ranklist. So, they won’t have to give out the prize money of 50K which was promised by them or keep it to themselves I don’t know.
Since they have rejudged submissions of that problem multiple times, we gave them a test case in which most of the codes would fail (including their fake accounts). Obviously, they did not agree and are telling us that this is against the rules and their decision is final. We have all the relevant screenshots related to the above incident. The faculty involved in the contest (Sumit Anand) was least helpful, this is what he literally said “The students have made a mistake (about rejudging solutions) but now I will have to support them”. He even accused us of cheating (Since we copied the code of a problem from GeeksForGeeks with proper attribution, which is perfectly fine under Codechef’s rules that you are allowed to use anything that’s available on the internet before the start of the contest).
CodeChef is also unable to help us, it seems that UEM has more control over CodeChef, as I can see another contest lined up in the future contest list by the same college UEM and their partner college IEM.
This is not their first time, They have screwed up a few more contests in the past.
Codechef was the very first website that I started programming in and I really appreciate the effort Codechef puts in but contests like these just deteriotates the quality of the platform, and that CodeChef should take action in such cases. I agree that monitoring all the contests is not possible for them, but cases like this, where there is a relatively large amount of cash prizes on the line, they should be more controlling with what goes on, because in the end it gives out the vibes that “Contests hosted on Codechef are untrustworthy”.
