There was a programming competition at my HS about half a year ago. I was sick that day but I was able to do it from home, online. When the results came I was satisfied with my results as I got pretty high percentile. I asked my friends for theirs they all said they got full score. Later I learned they all have cooperated together because the teacher just left them alone for half of the time. Originally I brushed it off as I did not place much value on this particular competition and just let them have their 5 minutes of fame.

Today they all got paid scholarships for one of the top unis in my state, as a result of their “excellentl performance”. My score was only 0.3 percentile from the acceptance boundary, and I’m fairly confident some of them would not have fared well without the mutual help.

Thankfully I already got accepted to my dream school in other state, however I reckon I’ll be salty about this for some time. </rant>