In the recent contest December Cook-Off 2021, Div 2 problem 3rd
, I found that these solutions to be exactly same and also these solutions
were submitted in the last few minutes of contest:
Admin, Please take some action
there is hell lot of cheating in last 30 min âŚ
so please admins reduce the time of contest from 3 hours to 2:30 hours .
Congrats! The admins did exactly what you asked and reduced the contest duration to 2:30 in December CookOff . The crowd of all these last minute cheaters arrived between 2:31 and 2:59 and they were very surprised to see that the contest is already over. Now their evil tricks canât possibly work and the honest participants are happy to see that massive late submissions of plagiarized solutions are not happening anymoreâŚ
Oh wait, maybe thatâs actually not the case. Could there have been some flaw in your logic?
Nah, bro, Cook-off used to be for 2.5 hours previously. They changed the start time of the contest but didnât change the duration. I donât think cheating has reduced. Itâs something we canât reduce at all.
Indeed, you are right. Thanks for the correction! Still the last contest demonstrated that a shorter 2.5 hours duration doesnât really help. While a lot of people desperately think that contests duration reduction would be a good idea, as shown by the voting results here.
In fact, I think that contest duration reduction may actually make it harder for honest participants to outrun the crowd of cheaters. In my Div.2 contests, I typically landed somewhere around either rank 100-200 or rank 500+. Depending on whether I could solve more problems than cheaters (or solve the same number of problems, but faster). Not sure whatâs the actual reason behind that, but cheaters tend to be somewhat âhonourableâ and delay submission of their plagiarized solutions until the very end of the contest. The same crowd of cheaters arriving an hour earlier with the same set of solutions would only make everything harder for us.
So this has been happening a long time and it is starting to affect all legit coders. It is almost impossible to reach 4* until we really give 5* performance which makes no sense. After having a rank of 360 in the first 30 minutes of December lunchtime was relieving. C looked tough. Although I donât really have an idea of how easy it was but after going through submissions of many people, every 1/3 submission I saw was exactly the same like even variables same and many of them had the exact same code submitted. Easy 100% plagiarism. Is the CodeChef plagiarism checker even working?!! Like this is a huge problem. Even 100% plagiarism submissions are not getting flagged. Take a look at these solutions.
There is cheating in huge numbers in every contest. Its alright if performance is decent but in case if we miss out on a problem and a lot of people cheat on it then rating decreases by a lot.
And like this it is becoming impossible to get ones rating increased.
I know that codechef cares the least about it but maybe codechef is not worth participating at all and only good for practicing.
The problem having problem code: MEANIDIAN has various submissions which are exactly the same. I was looking into some submissions to check how they have done it. But I am really shocked to see people are having the exact same solution.
These are only a few of them. I just dont waste my time checking all submissions. I guess you as the admin should ensure free and fair participation. If not, you are responsible to take action against the guilty. I request you to consider suspension of user id those who are involved in this.
@admin
this guy @aryan7002uploaded the solution of XORED question from long challenge january 2022, and after that hundreds of users uploaded same 300 line of code that he provided. I was shocked to see that after 1 day the submissions were around 30 and the next day after this guy uploaded this video (9 January) there was a sudden spike in the submissions of that questions. I was suspicious and i searched Youtube for the solution and i found this, luckily it wasnât hard to find his codechef id since he used SAME NAME ON CODECHEF AND GITHUB. it is very clear that he cheated and he should be banned.
I COULDNâT ATTACH 2 SS SO I GAVE THE LINK OF HIS CODECHEF PROFILE. YOU CAN CHECK THAT EVEN HIS PROFILE PICTURE ON CODECHEF AND GITHUB IS THE SAME
After completing my yesterday Cook-Off I was looking for the rest of the problems which were not solved by me and while up solving them I thought to take help from YouTube and guess what weird thing I notice.
Few of the Videos on YouTube Have been posted matching with the timeline of the real contest. This was really embarrassing as I noticed most of them were Indian YouTubers. I urge thereby Code Chef to temporarily Ban their account If they can or any way they can penalize such steps to maintain the essence of the contest.
