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by samb1729 1207 days ago
The students were neither ignorant nor arrogant for interpreting the rules as they did. The person who graded their submission is at fault here, and the students deserve to be told this if they’re reading these comments.

Someone who doesn’t know the difference between hosting a git repo and generating a static site with GitHub is unqualified to judge this project. The real lesson for these students is that there are people in this field who don’t really know what they are doing.
1 comments
lelanthran 1207 days ago
> The person who graded their submission is at fault here,

How? The competitors who adhere to the rules are necessarily disadvantaged compared to the rule-breakers.

How do you now fairly judge a competition when you change the rules after the game has ended? There is no other way to resolve a breaking of a rule other than by disqualification, because if you remove that rule after the game has ended then all the other competitors have worked harder (because they avoided breaking that rule) and will be judged next to the rule-breaker who worked less.

You're looking at it from the PoV of the rule-breakers, and saying "This is clearly a stupid rule". Look at it from the PoV of those competitors who had to do without github - they are saying "well, it's unfair that those people can win when we had to work harder because we did not use github".

And to be even more clear: the stupidity is in complaining about a rule after the game has ended.

Nowhere is this acceptable behaviour - you can complain about the rules before starting the game, you can try to get it changed, you can boycott the game, you can spread awareness ... but when you complain only when you were caught out, then that disqualification is soundly deserved.

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richbell 1207 days ago
> You're looking at it from the PoV of the rule-breakers, and saying "This is clearly a stupid rule". Look at it from the PoV of those competitors who had to do without github - they are saying "well, it's unfair that those people can win when we had to work harder because we did not use github"

You're right, it isn't fair if students were denied the use of industry-standard tools because of the technical incompetence of the competitions administrators falsely believing GitHub is a website generator. Sure, the students are obviously miffed that they were disqualified, but they were obviously following the spirit of the competition.

I hope this rule is amended and further clarified so that it's fair in the future. As it stands, it's very clear that the rule was written by someone who doesn't know what GitHub is and not by someone who doesn't want version control to be used.

) We were finally able to talk to our school's CTE(Career and Technology) director and explain our situation. I told her about our website and how we were accused of cheating, even though we provided a public GitHub repo containing the history of the project. She then revealed that she had actually judged our project and explained that it was disqualified for using "GitHub, the templating engine"(Yes, she called GitHub a templating engine). She then pointed me to this rule: ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/119j8o4/part_2_disq...

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samb1729 1207 days ago
What unfair advantage is gained by using GitHub to store the code? A privately hosted Gitea instance would have accomplished exactly the same thing without technically breaking a rule.

I would understand this point if they were leveraging Actions or something, but that isn’t mentioned so I’ll assume that is not the case. Their usage of GitHub does not appear to have been anything more than a convenient repository host.

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lelanthran 1207 days ago
> What unfair advantage is gained by using GitHub to store the code? A privately hosted Gitea instance would have accomplished exactly the same thing without technically breaking a rule.

If there was no advantage, then the students looked at the rules and said "Yup, those don't apply to us" and proceeded to break them?

It's a competition!

ALL the rules in competition are more or less artificial; that doesn't mean that competitors should expect to break them with no penalty.

> I would understand this point if they were leveraging Actions or something, but that isn’t mentioned so I’ll assume that is not the case. Their usage of GitHub does not appear to have been anything more than a convenient repository host.

If it gave them no advantage then they shouldn't have risked their entry being disqualified by using github.

It was a pointless risk for no gain, from the way you say it.

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