Brief background — I come from one of the premier colleges in India which happens to be an Institute of National Importance. This post is going to be about a cheater from out college's official CP Club called recursion. It is supposed to promote CP Culture but it instead promotes cheating culture but "helping" the students by leaking OA solutions for on campus company OAs. They even sell the solutions at times. There have been many blogs abut its members in the past where one of their specialist members solved Div 2F. I had also commented about their cheaters in that blog and about how they cheat their way to ICPC each year by buying out the solutions. Guess what? They even did it this year and both the teams entering ICPC were from this club. Both came in top 100 during prelims. In the regionals they managed to improve their ranks to top 20 but from the bottom of the list (let's give them credits for it at least they got to top 20. Why care if its from the bottom of the list?) The best team (best at cheating) who made their way to ICPC this year was of shu_900, shubhu_279 and S_V_M123. A team of all experts, one which is 1890 rated who were in top 10% of the participants at prelims suddenly felling to bottom 10% during regionals. Just before the regionals, this shubhu_279 guy also got Master perf in Div 2s abd used to do Div 2Es in live contests. The other ICPC team was also of recursion members led by their president who also got a rank around 100 in regionals out of less than 120 teams. Here is a list of their members.

Coming to the main topic, Recursion just had its inductions for the new batch 2 months back, training a new batch of cheaters. One prodigy SuryaHalder who almost hit specialist in just 133 problems, mastered this art really quick. He is such a prodigy that even out of those 133 he has solved, 65 are 800s. He is 1398 rated with just 6 1200s, 5 1300s and 3 1400s solved for all time. Yesterday, he cheated exceptionally well and managed to solve ABC in just 1 hour and D by the end of 2hrs, even beating his talented club senior Ptms2304 yesterday who trained him in this art, even after getting 2 skips himself. Surya really surpassed his former cheating trainers and outsmarted the codeforces rating system and MikeMirzayanov because his club seniors couln't get to Pupil without skips but he is on the brink of hitting specialist without them. Imagine a Pupil being so talented that he is beating seasoned candidate masters that too with almost no practice. Surya used to be a motivated teen who didn't cheat and had big dreams before joining recursion but they spoiled him by using their normal tagline they use in their club openly — "Cheating isn't bad. Getting caught while doing it is."

Surya practiced hard when he was genuine and took 27 contests to become Pupil but after joining recursion, he stopped practicing and almost hit specialist in just 11. Some other of the new recursion recruits who showed exceptional improvement after joining it are aayushanand737, gourav_27 and Tirthankarpal123. I leave it to the community to assess their profiles and determine how fair they are. Just keep one thing in mind while doing so — they were all Newbies for over a year and magically became pupils just after joining recursion. There are also some honest new batch recruits like SANDIPAN_KUNDU who haven't sold their soul for following their seniors orders by gaining quick rating through cheating. I hope they stay strong and don't fell into this cheating trap. It might be hard for them because their whole club normalizes cheating and their batchmates and seniors might call them dumb for not doing so.

Here is a list of all current recursion members you might want to check out- LIST. Their linkedin handles and other contacts are also listed here which they might try removing after this blog.

On an ending note, this club invites celebrated CPiers like demoralizer and striver_79 in their events to give talks, conduct their contests in association with AlgoZenith (with its name on their poster), and organisation owned by acraider who himself posts so much about cheating on linkedin. Do these people have any idea of how much they are harming their own image by associating with organizations like these just for a few extra bucks/reach? I think at this point popular CP influencers should do a background check of the people they are promoting or associating themselves with irrespective of what college they are associated to.

UPD — They also conduct offline sessions on topics like how to avoid getting plagiarism, teaching the 1st year students the same. God knows why they need to learn this!

Hello Guys! Welcome to the first episode of my blog series where I expose the best cheat.... I mean coders that are popular among us. I am planning to release further episodes in this series based on thorough research along with the evidences (If this blog isn't taken down unlike the ones that were initially written against big names like Psychotic_D).

In today's episode, our celebrity star is the most popular Indian DSA coach, striver_79 aka Raj Vikramaditya. If you are a coder from India, it is impossible that you don't know this guy. For those of you who aren't Indian, THIS IS HIS YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Although a lot of the content on his channel is free, this guy has minted a lot of money from the people who are beginners in DSA or preparing for placements by selling his courses. I am not here to comment on his business strategies of first giving something for free and then selling his services like referrals and courses here (if you don't know he is a Google employee who sells referrals to Google and is one of the most tagged Indian in DSA related LinkedIn posts). The main topic of this blog is going to be about how he built his empire of scams on the most common scam of this platform — CHEATING!

Claim: Raj Vikramaditya aka Striver became a Candidate Master by cheating in multiple if not all contests and eventually used this "milestone" as a source of credibility to build his empire.

Evidences:-

An initial look at his profile won't bother you much. But if you paste his username in Codeforces Visualizer, you see something like THIS. Notice that grey patch over there? That's the percentage of skipped solutions! But that's just 0.9% maybe he just cheated in one or two right?

Well a deeper look at his profile suggests something else. In fact the skipped solutions are so much that it took me another screenshot to show them all.

Judging from the dates when he got skipped, it seems like he got skipped at 8 contests! The contests too are so dispersed that we can't say he used to be a cheater who got on the right track. NO! THIS GUY GOT SKIPPED CONTESTS FROM 2017 TO 2019!!!

And it looks he deliberately wanted to push ranks to be credible. Look at the contest on 19-August 2018 in his skipped submissions. He jumped to Candidate Master in that one before getting the skip. A similar one can be seen when he tried to cheat his way to specialist. You can also notice he stopped giving contests after becoming CM because he got that "credibility" to fool the public and to get into Google. What's more concerning is these are only the instances when the instances of his cheating were blatant enough to be caught. From what I have seen, cheaters are only caught when they aren't careful enough to change their codes. That's like 1 in 10 instances (more when they are at the brinks of a new rank and are desperate for a push because then they even copy codes they don't understand and end up leaving a crucial detail). But even if we ignore those, it is safe to assume he cheated in at least 70 contests(being very conservative here. The plagarism checker back then was much worse than today and I am quoting this number as of today) to be caught in 8 (he isn't dumb enough to not change the leaked code and get caught in every contest he cheated in). So of all the contests in his profile, at least half (or maybe all) of his contests are cheated.

Final Message: If you are an Indian who is a fan of this guy (which you most probably are if you are an Indian), not every of your online teachers/coaches are clean. Some of them have a dark patch you haven't seen yet. Don't fall for the number of subscribers, rating or popularity. This mindset creates more cheaters like him who eventually scam you like he does. If someone builds a business out of lie, don't expect them to be honest while selling their services. Next time when you tag Striver in your post, remember promoting a cheater makes you no better than them. Maybe you don't cheat but is having a cheater as your idol or mentor any better?

If anyone from google is reading this feel free to research about his referral business :)