DWITE Contest

Round 4 marking messup

By Tony on Thursday January 17, 2008 At 12:27AM

When every team gets no more than 4/5 points on a question, chances are it's our fault. And it was. The reference data for the marking was rushed in this round, it wasn't checked over as much as it should have, and as a result two of the cases were simply wrong.

  • Question 1, line 4 should have been 221, not 220.
  • Question 5, line 21 should have been 42, not 5.

So we've actually gone and updated the marking for all the teams who should have received those points. This didn't significantly impact the outcome of the round. If anyone is still missing though, send us a message.

Speaking of messaging, we have a DWITE Forum set up on compsci.ca -- it's a good place to check after the contest, to see if any of the other teams had similar issues. It's also a good place to discuss problems and solutions.

We are now obviously looking into a more systematic approach to validate the accuracy of test data, to avoid such scenarios in the future. Possibly some independent testing. Otherwise I'm sure that I'll get to hear about it at least as much as I have after this round. I'd like to thank everybody who emailed, PMed, and made forum posts about our screwups! This feedback is crucial to the development, keep it coming.