Here's my story

Two months ago, I participated in Google Code-In. Now for those who don't know, briefly: it's an international contest specifically for <18 high school students that allows them to contribute to opensource work. Participating organizations present tasks to be completed by the students. There are easy tasks (1 point), medium tasks (2 points) and hard tasks (4 points). The contest's duration is two months (it just ended) and the top 10 on the leaderboard win the grand prize which is a free week at Google HQ in California, Mountain View. Google also awards $100 for every 3 tasks completed by every student up to a max of $500 (irrelevant of difficulty).

I worked pretty hard throughout the contest with VideoLAN. I optimized a lot of ARM assembly functions in x264. You can see my patches in the task submissions. Recently, we all received this email [0] on the mailing list and nobody was sure what it was all about. Some said that many 4-pointers VideoLAN tasks took very little time to complete and students could easily spam them and jump up the ranking list. Either way, Google never really clarified it and a couple of days ago, they decided they were going to nullify /every/ VideoLAN task completed after Jan 5th. [1]

I worked in bulk. I wrote a boatload of functions and towards the end of the contest I submitted the tasks one after the other. Before their decision I had 104 points and ranked 12th, after that I went down to 36 (32nd). Assembly is known to be hard and many of the fellow students in the top ten approved about how hard they were and stated how "awesome" google's decision (before we knew it) can be for me (they should've nullified only the tasks they thought were easy and ACTUALLY reviewed them) so I'd have gone up and into the top 10, instead, I lost all what my work was worth.

The top ten were not affected by the change (they all stayed, just their ranks changed). I worked hard and honest and I was the only one who was most severely affected. I complained many times to no avail, each time the admins stating they can do nothing about it and they are extremely sorry. I can't accept the apologies. I want my points back. This could've helped me a lot in my resume.

I posted here because I wanted more opinion on the matter. Perhaps I'm making too much of this and should've just pretended it never happened. If this is not the right place please ignore.

There are a number of points as to why I'm outraged: 1) The change does not make any sense and Google did not offer any clarification when I asked them and many other solutions made more sense. Nobody knows what Jan 5 has got to do with it. 2) I was one of the students who worked the hardest, and I was also the only one who dropped. 3) The reason I worked in bulk was because some of the mentors were busy, so it was really not my fault. 4) Translation tasks existed, and some of the students used Google Translate (which is cheating). Other students created many accounts and mass-claimed tasks to block others from working on them.

GCI Leaderboard: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/leaderboard/google/gci2011 My task list: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/student_tasks/google/gci2011/jacktheripper [0]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gci-discuss/96W3bz6GcEI [1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gci-discuss/tzFAmEp7CwQ

This may have been the cause of the whole issue: http://sachdevashubham.blogspot.com/2012/01/google-code-in-and-videolan-vlc.html