The cost of dishonesty

This article is primarily for Indian student community who has participated in this year’s TCS CodeVita. Past and future participants may also relate to it. Non-students may find it useful from numerical perspective, because I am going to throw some numbers in the blog.

This is hopefully my last blog on TCS CodeVita this season. CodeVita has grown in size, scale and popularity over the last 9 seasons. CodeVita is an open book contest and by design allows one to research a good solution, as well as allows one to freely code in IDEs of one's choice where rich tools like Profilers and Debuggers are available. Our endeavor is to provide as much of a real-life taste to the contest participants as possible. For CodeVita, we do not believe in imposing limiting constraints and hence it is a non-proctored environment. We can afford to do that because we have strong means of plagiarism detection.

I read a couple of blogs here on LinkedIn where lot of students expressed a feeling of dejection and helplessness regarding organized methods of cheating that the cheaters are resorting to. The sole purpose of this blog is to send out a loud and clear message to clean and honest candidates that their interests are very well protected in TCS CodeVita. Continue to do the right thing and leave the part to tackle the bad guys to us. They are not going to go very far with us. They can run but they can’t hide.

The reason why it takes time to declare CodeVita results is because of the time it takes to do plagiarism detection. This year since there were ~33 Lakh submissions, we had to employ 4x the hardware capacity to run the plagiarism detection batches. Even then, the batches ran up to 10x longer. The results are as follows

In a nutshell, only 1 out 3 people who could solve at least one problem in CodeVita, is honest. That’s pretty sad. In contrast to India phase, there is hardly any plagiarism when the Global phase is operational. Only students interested in competitive programming participate and they show a lot of integrity.

Indian students have been slowly but surely ceding ground to global counterparts. Last season of CodeVita saw no Indian student in a podium finish. If Indian students get so tempted to plagiarize, winning CodeVita will remain a distant dream. Get a grip, prevent your friends from falling prey to these mischievous thoughts. On a slightly humorous note, I hope all those who “paid” for a CodeVita solution with a “guarantee” that solutions will look different and beat the plagiarism checker, will ask for refund from your “service provider(s)”.

Any time now, combined results for both zones of India Phase will be out. Sincere request to please not ask result date or any procedural questions, in comments. Feel free to express your opinions though!

Next, if this trend of organized cheating continues, it will increase the cost and take fun out of the whole thing. Although, we do not want to, but the following scenarios are not unlikely in the years to come

• CodeVita may become paid
• CodeVita may be conducted only in test centers and you will be required to travel
• One may need to be always-connected on webcam and need high-bandwidth network to participate in CodeVita
• CodeVita may not extend any internships or job offers and may remain only a contest platform

 Finally, more bad news may await the cheaters when results are declared.