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.
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.
Odd, but true.