I was about to take part in the National Internet Programming Contest. I assumed a competition this big wouldn’t have any cheating, right? But yesterday I read the rules and found that in the preliminary round you write your programs at home and then upload them to NPSC. On the surface that doesn’t seem like a problem, but look a little deeper and you’ll see that holding a competition at home makes cheating very easy. A teacher from your school can sit right beside you and teach you how to write the code, just like a teacher showing you the method next to you during a mock exam. And since the competition has a time limit, if an opponent has a teacher helping them cheat, their problem-solving speed is bound to be fast. That’s how I got knocked out before I even reached the finals….
Speaking of this competition, I was surprised to find that some of my former classmates also took part, with several teams (including the 7X team). It makes you think Taiwan has a lot of IT talent, right? But that’s because their school strongly supports programming competitions. Unlike our school: after winning an award outside school, we’re supposed to get a commendation on our record, but it has dragged on for half a semester and still hasn’t been sent in = =