Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures?
I distinctly remember my grad school classes, where even by getting 95% I'd be dead last in the class rankings because all the Chinese/Indian students would get 98/99/100% on their assignments. I didn't really care about it, figuring that their studying habits were much more diligent than mine, until one time I arrived in the classroom 45 minutes early and found out a sizable proportion of them were merrily exchanging answers and copying off of each other. I then learned that it was something they would do pretty much every single time.
(of course, it was not all of them– a few were hard workers who went by the rules. But in all of my classes, the majority of students from those cultures would operate in such a manner).
So I'm wondering– is this purely selection bias, or is collusion just more acceptable in certain cultures? The US (and most of Europe) heavily penalizes it at all levels of education, but I wonder if it's the case everywhere in the world.
Given all the anecdotes around here offering the same experience, I'm interested in this too. If it is a cultural thing, I'd say two things:
1. It makes sense. A lot of sense. In the real world, it's far more useful to be able to collaborate effectively than to always adopt an adversarial or competitive attitude.
2. It should be addressed openly. Personally, I think a more collaborative environment would help a lot of us in a lot of ways, but sometimes that's just not how things are supposed to be done (e.g. assignments and tests in most US schools); in that case, everyone might be a little more aware and happy if it were clear up front -- in very multi-cultural situations -- what the expectations are regarding individual work.
Of course, that won't stop everyone, and it doesn't address every problem, but making everyone aware of the differences could stop a lot of misunderstanding and, potentially, what's technically cheating even though that may not be the intent.
[edit: Of course, some people do just plain cheat, knowingly and willfully; this is not intended to excuse that behavior, which is crap and should be punished.]
From my own experience as an Indian student. We colluded a lot. In assignments and even in examinations. I went to a pretty elite Indian institution( hint: Its near the banks of a very holy river.)
I think that many Indians try to take advantage of the 'system' wherever they can and do not see it as wrong. I see it as wrong now in hindsight, but back then it seemed like a mildly wrong thing to do.
This was my experience in grad school, to the point where some of my Southeast Asian friends were taken aback that I wouldn't give them test answers (just as I was taken aback that they were asking). These were nice, kind, honest, hard-working people. They just didn't view cheating on tests as wrong.
It was such a problem in our program that the professor of one class spent a good portion of one lecture talking about why cheating was wrong and what would happen if you were caught.
However, it was striking to me that I never saw the Americans of Asian/Indian descent participating in this type of collusion. So I don't think it's a cultural thing as much as it is a outcome of the educational system in those countries.
EDIT: Removed name of particular country, since it's a regional phenomenon. There's no sense in calling out a particular country.
When I was a grad student (in America) a couple of decades ago, I was involved in two seminars/roundtable discussions that stayed with me. One was on sexual harassment- I'll save that for another thread. The other was a cultural awareness 'sharing.' For context, this was around the time of the Anita Hill testimony regarding Clarence Thomas
So sexual harassment and multicultural diversity were on the country's mind.
The department had a cultural awareness discussion centered on an exchange between the American graduate students and the recently arrived Chinese graduate students.
To my astonishment, the Chinese saw us American students as unfriendly, always retreating and 'sticking to our own kind.' They found it very hard to connect with us, much as they wanted to. It was because of the way we worked. When American students got their homework or assignment, we went to our desk and worked on it. We did the readings alone, we turned in the problems that we worked alone, and had very little discussion about the matter. We approached the courses individually, and this put the Chinese students off.
It put them off because they were very much about community. They discussed the lectures and reading until every single one of them understood it. They lived and died together. If homework was supposed to be individual work, then they did it individually- but they collaborated heavily on everything up until the point of homework- and they made sure everybody knew the concepts, math, etc. for doing the homework.
This is a very efficient way of learning new material. In fact, I've read in TIMS studies (or, books about the studies like 'The Teaching Gap' and 'The Learning Gap') that this is the asian way of teaching and learning in lower grades as well. There was less of an emphasis on (or, perhaps better, less of a recognition of) individual talent as being the basis of success in school, and more of a culture of "we can all get this together, if you can't it's because you are unwilling to work."
So I am not at all surprised that you observed heavy collaboration- I would be disappointed, however, if you saw deliberate 'cheating.' I can sympathise that people who don't fathom the concept of individuality in learning may struggle to understand the line between what we accept as cheating and not cheating. But that is not to say that they don't, and cheat anyway.
I feel as you do, but it's worth pointing out that if you come from a different frame of reference you may not be observing what you think you are observing. I can't say for sure in this case of course (hence how I ended my post), but he may have seen, say, discussion (in a language he may not be fluent in), showing each other papers, etc., yet may not have been seeing the actual 'cloning' of homework answers. If you walked into a bunch of American students doing this (but couldn't, for whatever reason), it's more natural to assume that there is direct cloning involved.
But different cultures have different norms.
Let's say, for example, that problems 3, 4, and 7 are assigned. Now, problem 7 is a bitch, but shares some of the devilish details, perhaps the 'trick,' with problem 6. Let's also assume that the course requirements are "You must do your own work on homework." As a team, the group worked problem 6 together. But one of the group was still struggling to complete problem 7 for homework. He turns to his friend for help, and the friend replies "remember what we did in problem 6? You do the same thing, but with two <whatevers> instead of one."
Is this cheating?
The direct help "with two <whatevers>" is getting close, but if you are from another culture you may, honestly, think no. Because remember, your whole understanding of education is about getting/doing whatever you need to do in order to solve the problem. So you are going to judge rules differently than someone whose first instinct is "this has to be my work only-- I'll fail all by myself." (I hypothesize that this is part of the problem with international IP laws as well.)
On a personal note, one the other side of the desk I was delighted when students teamed up on homework and did extra. In fact, making solution manuals available and publishing old exams was simply a sneaky way for me to get them to do more work.
You've just made a story my brother told me click.
He spent years living in Taiwan. He came back to North America for college. He was taking an international law course, and Mandarin (he spoke, but didn't read/write as well as he wanted to) at the same time.
To improve his Mandarin he translated his law notes into Mandarin and distributed them to the Chinese students for feedback. As a result he aced Mandarin, and they all aced the law course.
I always thought that was very nice and clever of him, but until you described that cultural difference I didn't realize how much he was simply continuing to live within cultural norms for the culture he had been in.
Thanks, this is interesting. It seems to me there's an excellent middle ground that could help American students get a more social (and potentially effective) education, and also encourage some focus on individual achievement in Chinese and possibly other Asian cultures.
There is a difference in collaboration and collusion.
Collaboration is a way to share ideas, and as a group, innovate or improve the way problems are solved and new ideas developed.
Collusion is a way a group completes a task, in education or practice, with the minimum amount of effort and an equivalent level of quality.
An education system (instead of the concept of a culture) does not equate collusion and cheating at some level, it provides neither the students nor their prospective employers a benefit.
No. Such things were unheard of. As a professor I tried to institute them, but two things worked hard against it. (1) It was a commuter school, so getting people together outside of class was very difficult, as they didn't reside there and they had other places to be. (2) The concept of what to do in a study group was completely foreign. The social pressure to 'behave,' that is, be a good group member, do your share, and so on, wasn't particularly strong. In effect, like a lot of things, it benefited those who least needed the benefit. It also hurt them (they were often the same people who had important other stuff to attend to). Once it went from mandatory to optional, it died.
I'm an international student from China, and now I'm TAing a CS intro class in an US university(it's ranked top 30).
I found many Chinese students cheating and am not surprised, but what surprised me was that many US students cheated as well. Since I'm from China I know very well the kind of collusion culture : people care their grades too much and make mistakes. However, from what I have heard, US universities have strict policy against cheating, and students from US generally don't cheat.
To put it into figure: 15 out of 60 cheated, and 4 are Chinese while 9 are from US. I'm really disappointed as my college is even ranked top 30, and this changed my impression about US colleges. I'm transferring out to an ivy and hope there won't be much cheating in these prestigious ivies, but then Harvard Cheating Scandal came.
Now I feel really bad about US. I thought it is a place where ingenuity and honesty are upheld most.. Sigh.
I believe this will change once you get out of non-intro CS. My friends and I work for the CS department and we see people whom are not interested in CS or are required to take just the intro course cheat often.
The trivial solution to homewt cheating is to stop the worthless practice of assigning and grading duplicate homework. Assign unique projects, or don't grade mass homework, so incentives don't get misaligned.
One of the excuse of those who support corruption is that they are helping their friends. But there can be artificial friendship. On a survey or poll some years ago in India, those who supported corruption said it is way of introduction of businessman to a bureaucrat. Mario Puzo said mafia is friend of friends.
Their is a well known saying in India, Indians steal in Dhoti (traditional indian pants), while westerners steal in suites. Corruption is prevalent in all parts of the world just the type of corruption changes. Wherever, power and money is involved, there is corruption.
That is the excuse in India to fight corruption. Everybody is fighting corruption, Indians are not. But if you think further, Spying is also cheating and corruption which is glorified everywhere.
there is plenty of high level corruption in India too, and on top of that you have to deal with the pervasive low level corruption. One of the things that caused my dad to decide to leave Bangladesh was having to pay a bribe to get phone service installed.
You're conflating a lot of things -- I'd hesitate before noting correlations to causation.
I'd consider viewing things under governmental structure, incentives, and the checks and balances in play than attributing any one culture or nation state to be some kind of paragon of virtue. Efficient governance is a luxury of first world countries, where enough people are capable and incentivized to play by the rules for it to work.
I do personally subscribe to freedom and the desire of the population for equitable governance and a level playing field for a better society, but that's a discussion for another time.
Are you even looking at the map you linked to? Do you not see the Asian countries (ex-Japan) colored in reds and dark oranges, while North America, Australia/New Zealand, and western Europe are in shades of yellow? The major Western economies have scores of 70+ (U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Australia), while the major Asian economies, ex-Japan, have scores in the 20's and 30's. South Korea straddles the two, with a score in the 50's.
Of course not. But the amount of corruption in places like India would make Dick Cheney blush.
Westerners can't really appreciate it unless they've experienced it. In the US, shameless corruption is rare. Dick Cheney genuinely believes what he's doing is justified in some way. In India, people have no shame. That creates the major difference: pervasive corruption among common people. Not just the wall street lobbyist, but the guy hooking up your phone service.
>>Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Generally there exists 0 ways to fight this sort of cheating or corruption or unfair play or whatever you call it. So the net result is people are forced to put up with it. You may ask why it is so difficult to fight it out. Starting at every levels, you just can't as an individual take on a whole a system. You can try, but the end result will be that you will be crushed. You will waste a lot of time, energy and end achieving nothing in the end.
You can't do much against any government employee as they will pretty much have the rights to screw if you want. Grievance redressal is useless and next to non existent. Almost any body here in India can work, especially in Government sectors with total lack of accountability or fear of action regardless of their actions. Same applies to educational institutions and even corporate environments. Corruption and politics is rampant, corporates are only marginally better than government institutes.
You will surprised at toxic high levels of politics and corruption in nearly all corporate sectors which advertise themselves as promised lands of merit based culture. Politics and corruption thereby happens for all sorts of reasons, Language, regional affiliations, caste, culture, color and religion- You name it. Promotions, a work assignment in a foreign country, out of the turn perks, unjustified hikes you name it, and it happens.
I've even lost the count how many times I've seen such things happen in the Indian software companies. Scenes where hardworking people getting screwed, some guy who sleeps on his job getting all the milk and honey just because his manager happens to speak his mother tongue, or belongs to the same state, or his religion, or caste is far too common.
Often there are no ways to fight it. No HR, no body to complain to and pretty much any body you can contact to put you case forward is likely to be your manager's friend.
This is case even in colleges. A lot of hidden gangs exist, teachers generously reward their favorite students.
Almost anybody who cheats almost feels they sort of are entitled to do so.
This case only happens to come out in a place where students found it was unacceptable to cheat.
this manifests itself in the job market as well, as people from the same culture/background "help" each other get positions/contracts. then again, isn't this what humans have always done, tend to their own? I mean, if you identify with a group, you naturally show some loyalty to that group.
Because I've lived in several countries and somewhat assimilated different cultures as my own, I personally don't identify with any one group enough to do this. So among cross-cultural people I can say they/we tend to the opposite. Just from personal experience that is...
You seem to be saying you had graded (with grades that went somewhere on a transcript that matterd) problem sets in grad school. That is a rather antiquated concept, even for undergrad..
There is a problem, but I'd think twice before calling it collusion or cheating. Here in India the social norms are a little different - when you talk about classmates, groups of friends, teams and gangs, the failures and successes of one are the failures and successes of all.
Some examples:
* I had two friends back in college, making us a gang of three. If two of us did well on a particular subject and the third didn't, we'd get called over to his place by his mum, where she'd beg us to teach him and help him out. Home cooked food was a very common and effective bribe.
* At our first job interview on campus, we told the interviewer that we were all three joining the company, or none of us would. All three of us got in.
* One of us having a girlfriend when the other two didn't meant he was an asshole. Two of us being hitched meant we were obligated to move heaven and earth to help out the third guy.
* Each of us would do one third of the coursework, and we'd coach the others on it and learn the rest. This also applied to individual work - we'd just split it in three parts and share all of it.
* At the final year project / thesis, we did collude. I was freelancing at the time, and I managed to land an interesting project building a case handling / lifecycle system for a client. I put that design forward as my final year project, and listed the other two as my "team members". We all got top marks.
Do I regret this? No, not really. These guys were my friends. People called us the Three Musketeers,
and I sure as hell wasn't going to leave either of them behind. And they would have (and did) the same for me. Would we still do it if it was illegal? I don't know. Maybe.
Now, ten years down the line, we've all gone our separate ways. There is still pressure, though. Two of us are married, and if and when we meet the third's parents, we will hang our heads in shame. We didn't help find him a wife.
if code jam restricts the sharing of code (come up with your own answers individually, emphasis on your, own, and individually), then three competitors with the same verbatim code is cheating. The test is not designed to cater and IMO should not cater to a particular culture, it is I believe, designed to be a means of identifying individuals of a skillset.
Unfortunately the title of this begins with 'Indian' which suddenly shifts the emphasis on their origin and not that fact that there was alleged cheating.
If we were to remove 'Indian' from the title, this post and mine responding to it, wouldn't be all that relevant, which kind of speaks to the sensationalism of the bit and why it is so popular especially in the technical community.
So, now what I really want to know is, for those that did submit their code, what they were thinking. Most people who intend to cheat try to obfuscate the code to hide detection. Another possibility was just being rash and hoping that it was an automated service that didn't really look at the code so much as the output. Another possibility, if we do take into account cultural norms, they didn't think there was anything wrong about posting the same answer. In either case, a lesson was learned.
We'd call this teamwork. It's understood that GCJ will try to find cloned submissions, but for a lot of people telling them not to form teams simply does not compute. It might be three guys sitting beside each other in a dorm room or a lab, or it might be a team on chat. Either everyone knows they all can't win first place, or maybe not any place. That's not the point. If you're in a team, either everyone tries or no one does.
If this is what I think it is, the alternative would have been not to participate at all. Because GCJ is a zero risk way to try something challenging, why not give the team a go? More often than not, each member might have tried different solutions or come in having read up on different subjects.
You make it sound like Indians are mentally incapable of working alone (or perhaps you're exaggerating for effect). Regardless, this is not the case. As an Indian, I know that cheating is more accepted in India, but I've never heard anyone delude themselves into calling it 'teamwork'.
I'm not generalizing - I'm sure there are plenty of Indians in that round who played by the rules, and plenty who tried deliberately to cheat (besides the ones who were actually caught). I'm saying that 'collusion' is thought of differently here in a lot of circles.
Aside: Why "Indian coders" and not just "Three coders"? Would this have ever been titled "white coders found cheating"? I know this isn't the point of the article, but I wonder if, on HN, we should consider clipping "gratuitous adjectives" in titles that contribute to perpetuating dominant systems.
They are from the country named India. Thus Indian coders. Color has nothing to do with it. If they were from America the title would not have been white coders but American coders.
Probably because that's the demographic the site was created to serve: NextBigWhat is an Indian tech blog, focusing on Indian startups and the Indian tech ecosystem. Their "About" page has a few quotes calling themselves the "Techcrunch of India."
From what my friends have told me, corruption and cheating is much more culturally accepted in India. So although race has no place being in a conversation, culture is relevant to the discussion. Also, white is not a culture, race, or country of origin, why would you put that in the title anyway?
The problem is that it does seem to be cultural. In every one of my computer science classes, students from India almost always shared answers on the test, copied each others' homework, and felt there was no problem with it.
I always wonder what happens to all these honest Americans once they get into Wall Street. Or these days Silicon Valley where keeping people addicted to social feeds and video streams is making an honest living. Let not even talk about the guys who sold the rest of the world on WMD's.
I'm competing in Code Jam, and it's nice to think that everyone is interested in playing fair. If you're not capable of solving the problems at this stage, you won't be capable of solving them at the later stages either, so in that respect I don't really see the point in cheating.
All it really means is that a few of the borderline-qualifying competitors missed out.
EDIT: Might be interesting to download everybody's round 1B solutions and look for similarity. I'm going to attempt to do this now.
EDIT2: Boy, Google sure don't make it easy to download everybody's solutions...
This behaviour was common in the last Facebook Hacker Cup too. Most of the announcements of rounds starting included discussion of (and in some cases links to) solutions.
I guess it's part and parcel - I think Facebook did take action against obvious plagiarisers. If not, the later rounds will weed out the cheaters in any case.
I think you are missing the point here , instead of 3 cheaters three honest coders could have qualified to the next round , which would in turn give them the chance for competing in round 2 and round 3.
If someone barely missed passing through 1st round, chance for him to make it through any of the following rounds is practically non-existant. Exception being if he's experienced competitor who fell short for some reason.
Well, it will only be the last 3 spots that are (substantially) affected by 3 cheaters - everybody else either qualified or failed to qualify anyway.
And the luck I'm referring to is in timing. If you look at the scoreboard for round 1B, 1000th place scored 34 points and a time of 1:30:38. 1001st place 34 points and a time of 1:30:48.
Imagine this scenario ,It is round 1C . A talented programmer started competing there are only 20 minutes to go. He solves the Small and Large test cases for Problem A ,and only the small for problem C. But Alas ! his rank is 1002 , he doesn't qualify even though on topcoder he is in the top 200's.
The quality of higher education in India is just bad (I am originally from India) making it more about the degree* than about education itself. Given this, copying assignments is rampant as it is an economically sensible step to getting the degree (without having to also getting the education). A part of the problem is also that the professors themselves are barely good (as such I come from a very reputed engineering college) to provide quality education for those who actually care about it. Students had no trust on the course syllabus itself. So they would copy the assignments for the degree, and if interested, would pursue self-study for the education.
A student in my session once remarked that these colleges are still very reputed because ultimately the students coming out of the colleges are still very good. This is not because of the college though -- The students going "in" have to be extremely good in the entrance exams to get into the college* .
Based on the advice a relative gave me, I balanced my efforts between the degree and education (given the two do not overlap as much) to maintain just average grades in college purposefully. If my grades in the last semester were better than the average, I would reduce my degree/assignments effort while increasing my education efforts studying in the college library.
I do not think this is limited to India though. I was teaching assistant for a course at a reputed US university, and found a programming assignment for a group of 17 oriental students to be exactly the same. So it was clear that only one of them had actually done it. Until I found that one of the students did not even remove the original author's name from the assignment (!) and this name was none of the 17!
Another incidence I recall from the same US university is when some 38 out of 40 students were proven to have copied the assignments. The explanation the teaching assistant gave to the professor was that it was not a good idea to have an assignment due just two days before the final exams.
PS: I am not suggesting of course that cheating in the Code Jam is justified by any means. Just trying to explain where the cheating culture is coming from.
* Keep in mind the significantly higher population as well as population density in India as compared to say the US, which amongst other things makes the market very competitive.
The biggest problem is you can't get into any elite institution by doing "Learning the concept thing". There is far too much competition for marks and too many people competing. The only way you can get in, is you have to mug up and memorize everything by heart.
What's worst same thing continues every where.
Do you serious think, companies that come to hire look at how the candidates work, Do they check if the guy is known as somebody who gets the work done? They simply check if the guy knows some algorithms from the books. Or some pointless puzzles, which can be gamed by practicing it for an hour a day.
This sort of thing works at all levels. It even works at some big web giants like Google.
As a society we reward this kind of behavior lot. And then when we get it back, why do we look so surprised?
Recommendations from former employers does not seem to work either. I have some very good recommendations on my LinkedIn profile, but note that many dumb people I knew also have great recommendations.
This is terrible. I am from India and I know how deeply copying is rooted in the brains of students here. Basically, all parents (and thus children) care about is marks. So, students learn copying and tend to copy all the assignments. Plug, we have professors who are good for nothing and accept this equally.
Recently, I made a small web app and got lowest marks in class for project. In another project, when I told my idea to professor, she was all like, "this is too small, increase the scope!" So, my idea of attendance tracker expended to "Learning Management System". I used WordPress as foundation for app and added plugins. Instead of testing anything, professor asked, "What does "collapse menu" do?" Nothing else asked.
Other people who copied it all and shied crappy command line "hospital management system" and other things scored way higher than me.
While all people do not copy here, copying is not checked at all and this indirectly encourages it. India is worst place to be a programmer right now. At least in college. I don't think companies are any better. I had a friend certified as "Java Programmer" for a crappy one day program.
Well yours may be the typical scenario. I had the slightly opposite experience.
I built Warehouse management system with RFID. i bought a RFID reader and few cards, connected with serial port to PC and basically had a checkout check-in system in place (for the curious, Java is the language, sadly i lost the original source code :( still have the RFID reader tough ).
On the demo day the professor was so happy with my project, the first question e asked was "From where did u buy this project?" . He was very reluctant to believe that projects of such scope can be built by students. If the professors are so sure the projects are copied, why do they even grade them?.
Ya and most of the students in my class bought projects(C Compiler, Steganography etc,) for few thousand rupees and got equally good marks (Hey , i got the top mark ;) .
I've had same experience when in my first year, I made a GUI app with Win32 API while others were giving command line stuff. Teacher clearly said, "This is too complex, even I will need 2-3 days to understand it. Did you buy it?"
I have to make fourth year project soon, hope I get same reaction!
Highest compliment I ever got from a teacher: "You got then highest score of everyone who didn't cheat."
I think that knowing that he knew that they cheated and I didn't, that meant something that lasted more than that the artificial confines of that one class.
I recall being in a similar situation. I had done significant marketing/PR for my project and that helped me avoid this issue. Since mine was an original project (a rare phenomenon), it was not very difficult to get the project famous amongst other students and then the professors.
The students in the next semester started asking me for the project files to copy it for submission as their own project. I had to be very polite to not give while maintaining my relationship with them.
This was a hardware project (IC design) I did back in 1998. Open source hardware was uncommon then, and most of the professors were not even online. Further, open-sourcing this would have meant more students in the upcoming semesters copying the work and submitting it as their own, something which I did not want.
The submission's url just has some editorial fluff that doesn't say anything useful and has no extra information. Would be a shame to give them the traffic for essentially cut paste + crappy commentary.
From what it seems, problem of corruption in India is not limited to the Government or big corps alone. It is a deep seated cultural issue, at grass roots level, in the tiniest of day-to-day transactions and actions. And I am afraid to say it starts with the proud claim of calling everything a jugaad [1] in the first place - a hack or easy way out which lends to itself a cheap name.
While a portion of jugaad, a prideful hack, is certainly useful and of positive kind, but there is a significant negative portion of it, the one which is unhealthy from karma/long-term-impact point of view, that is rampant in Indian subcontinent. It's a mess. And I believe the main reason for shrinking competitiveness and resources of the place.
You are the first person whom I have encountered who acknowledges the grass-root and "common man" level of corruption in India.
In the last 5 years or so, I am finding this corruption becoming even more widespread even, as you rightly pointed out, in the tiniest of the day-to-day transactions!
Thank you virtualmic, yes karma is what I figured our country is poor at. We have an extremely poor karma. To put it simply, most of us are running after marks and grade points during our school age, and easy money and promotions and boot-licking after that.
There are only few who ever thought of doing it the right way, working hard or even voting the right people to power. Everyone else only expects things to work, and yet does it the jugaad way cursing everyone else on the way.
I'd say the collective karma of our nation is broken; and where ever it has, things have imploded or gone for worse as we can already witness. Look at any community or country out there, it's always the fundamentals that make or break its destiny.
Question for HN: Many CodeJam competitors (this is not limited to CodeJam, though) do these competitions so often that they essentially have a library of similar problems and solutions to reference. In which case, a top competitor can identify a similar problem, copy the source code from his previous solution, and slightly modify it to the problem's specifics.
Is this considered cheating? It's incredibly frustrating for a competitor like me - who makes it into Round 2 by the skin of his teeth (rank 768 in round 1A) - to see the top guys (whose names I recognize!) finish problems in minutes. Is it possible for them to just be that fast? Maybe, but it's well-known that many copy solutions from previous problems.
This is a comment that often comes up, but rest assured the top competitors really are that fast from scratch. There are some screencasts floating around of Petr competing in Toocoder SRMs, and you can also look at the timings on I site Topcoder and ACM competitions, where there really is no copy and paste. That said, one does end up memorizing some things with practice. For example, after having to code it up a few times it is easy to get a nice short implementation of network flow that you can type in in 2 minutes or so.
How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost?
I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?
To all the Indians here who are saying collusion / cheating is deeply ingrained in the culture - I'm just curious, is this true at IITs as well? Those schools are generally well-regarded, so I'd be interested to hear what things are like there.
Though someone in the comments is hinting that they are from IIT BHU and confirmed this thing in their college.
I won't be surprised at all if IITs have same thing. Whiles many people are there who understand concepts, I don't think all are learning after so much mugging up in entrance exams.
These days IIT's are about two things. First- A good brand to have on your resume.
Second- If you don't get a good offer during campus hiring. You basically drop out, give CAT and then apply for an MBA so that you can now get a better offer at the end of your MBA. And so that you can probably go and work at some investment bank in the US.
In short, its all about job offers and placements and has very little to do with whatever 'changing the world' thing we are all thinking or have heard about.
What's interesting is that none of the IITians have spoken on this thread. You guys called it a goat and then wow'ed to say oh man see it is goat. That sounds so much like pure jealousy.
If there is anything that has ever worked in education system of India - it is the IITs. That's one place which certainly has good karma, and I am proud about it. The question - is there cheating in internal exams of IITs?
I am an IITian, specifically from IITB. I can say for sure that the level of research in general is quite pathetic, except for one or two groups.
The only thing IITs used to be good were, (in their early and mid years) to gather some good minds together and give them quite a bit of freedom and a nice environment (in the hostels and such) so that they can discuss their ideas, which they used to implement not while there in IIT, but after graduating.
However, in the recent years, the quality of these minds has become a bit questionable (this is purely anecdotal, no concrete proofs). One thing is for certain though, the amount of discussion which was there in years when each hostel room did not have its own computer was quite high, which now in the age of facebook and multiplayer games has reduced by a huge margin.
As far as copying assignments is concerned, that is a pretty common phenomenon in case of general course assignments, unless one is really interested in that course and wants to learn.
I can attest that it is a very cultural thing in India. Ethically, it becomes a question like everyone else is doing it, so it isn't cheating;
When I started with university, I had tried to make it a point to do my assignments by myself. Yet, it became the case that I spent more time and got worse grades that most people around. I continued with this for a while, until the point where I stopped giving a fuck about my grades; I have used someone else's work ever since. It is a lot like what Lance Armstrong said about the cycling doping scandal. It is wrong, but not unfair; Unfortunately, this is the way it works.
I've been a TA for Matlab course in my university for three semesters and there are a lot of students cheating in assignments. I thought it would be interesting to see how different submissions are grouped into clustered so I made a visualization page (and a bunch of scripts). Turns out that there are quite a few clusters even the similarity threshold is set to be 90%.
It's also odd how no one seems to be asking why GCJ doesn't allow teams. On one level this is also participants forcing teams into a system that doesn't support it.
I distinctly remember my grad school classes, where even by getting 95% I'd be dead last in the class rankings because all the Chinese/Indian students would get 98/99/100% on their assignments. I didn't really care about it, figuring that their studying habits were much more diligent than mine, until one time I arrived in the classroom 45 minutes early and found out a sizable proportion of them were merrily exchanging answers and copying off of each other. I then learned that it was something they would do pretty much every single time.
(of course, it was not all of them– a few were hard workers who went by the rules. But in all of my classes, the majority of students from those cultures would operate in such a manner).
So I'm wondering– is this purely selection bias, or is collusion just more acceptable in certain cultures? The US (and most of Europe) heavily penalizes it at all levels of education, but I wonder if it's the case everywhere in the world.