Preventing Cheating At Hackathons

theodp writes "The fist rule of Hackathon Club is don't talk about Hackathon Club cheating. But ever-increasing stakes — the MHacks Hackathon at the Univ. of Michigan is offering over $30,000 in prizes — prompts Kevin Conley to broach the subject, suggesting it's time for some common-sense measures — including showing one's code or reducing prize money — to discourage Hackathon ruses, which can include pre-coding, faked live demos/videos, and the use of remote teammates."

They cracked my hack-a-thon!

[Zero__Kelvin]

"1. The demonstration of the hack is fake."

If you allow video submissions as some kind of proof then your "hackathon" is broken and they "hacked" it.

"2. The hack is real, but the coding was done or started by the team before the start of the hackathon."

There is no such thing as code that doesn't really on previously developed code. You used printf! You're out!

"3. The hack is real, but the coding was done by a larger team than allowed due to unauthorized remote teammates."

Somebody needs to read The Mythical Man Month. Adding more hackers to a late hacking project just makes it later. If they can stay organized and succeed in a larger group in a limited time frame then they have truly accomplished something even most software engineers cannot do.

Total off-topic

[grumpyman]

Most of the critical comments on the article do not understand the issue. Typical hackathorn is meant to build and demo a solution for a problem in a short time (folks comment about 'hacking', seriously do you know what hackathorn is about?). The problem is that the 'idea' is self identified - you pick your problem. If it is more run like a programming contest where participants do not know what the problem is ahead of time, and presented then it'll be more meaningful.