Long Challenge has become one of the most unethical contests on Codechef. People do what not to increase their rating, gathering codes in every way possible, making tons of submissions, etc. etc.(I mean what’s the point? You’re not even increasing your accuracy, just figuring out things by making hundreds of submissions, changing your code a li’l each time. Sometimes it teaches you a few intricate things, I agree, but mostly it’s a redundant freedom to actually aid you in becoming a better coder) I have seen even people even selling solutions (with modifications of course to beat the MOSS) and making money out of it! And as a result, there is no dubiety atleast in recent times that the rating changes after Long Challenge is quite not justified.
Here are my points why LC should be unrated :
Point 1. The MOSS is not strong enough to check plagiarism when it comes to converting the code to a different language, or maybe even changing sufficient variable names. I have witnessed with my own eyes submissions of my friends who share algos and even solutions after modifying them a li’l, and they just manage to pass without any plagiarism penalty. With 2 in a group of 5 doing that, don’t you think quite a lot of people are actually doing that when it comes to participation from so many people?
Point 2. The initiative of Long Challenge is extremely good, and you do get to learn a lot of things while implementing. I myself have learnt quite a lot of things in past long challenges when trying to implement a solution. But, the point is, people who would ACTUALLY want to learn would participate in it anyway, even if it’s unrated, for the sake of just enjoying the art of problem solving ! Making it rated just dilutes the contest or the ranklist, or rather the entire rating bars, because there is no actual strong way to check how many people actually solved the questions on their own, scratching their heads out and thinking up a solution through days, and how many merely gathered help from others.
And the sad news is, CC is being used mostly by Indian Engineering Students nowadays (and I take shame in saying this,cuz evidently most foreigners who are actually world class pros are quite openly against CC as a platform, quite obviously because of these as predominant reasons) to just boast about their CC Rating, which they are getting by just performing in Long Challenges ! Scrutinizing many codechef profiles, you cannot help but notice people are using LC just to increase their rating, and there’s no way to check how originally they solved the problem legit.
As I conclude, I’d like to say, @admin Please increase the number of short contests per month on CC, rather than just 2 HUGELY UNBALANCED contest every month. That’s why people don’t even want to participate in them cuz they know their rating would go down and they would have to wait again for a month to give it a shot to increase their rating once again!
Otherwise, I mean, what’s the point? It just reveals Codechef to be evidently a bad platform day by day, doesn’t it? I won’t say as a platform it’d ever go down because of these reasons cuz obviously people won’t stop using it because they can boast of their CC ratings when they sit for #placements!
But that’s not quite what Directi made Codechef for,( right Anup Kalbalia?), when they had the motive to increase the awareness of programming amongst people of India to do better in IOI/ICPC,right?
And like this you expect people from India to #GoForGold? LOL. Take that.
is too less for this post. Damn, I wish I can like a post multiple times!
But trying to go one level up ! 
