[Day +14] Cheat, or no cheat… That is the question

QUOTE OF THE DAY

#MORNINFG (8:20)

_OVERALL:

The day was calm focused and productive. After the hectic start of the morning the pace did go down (mostly due to my reduced brain speeds and the absence of any pressing deadlines (a rare find for the 42’s reality).

Regardless of the leisurely pace and the zen mood the day was, in fact, very results rich. Which is yet another proof that working longer and harder doesn’t always get you further.

So I stay true to my “healthy-body-and-sound-mind-first-and-the-rest-will-come” lifestyle. And with this in mind I did, first, took 40 min of quiet after lunch time that was a 20-min nap + 20-min yoga session and the second one was a 1h walk from school to home (which is my form of meditation when I don’t have enough time for a workout or a proper run). And at the moment I’m writing the usual day summary with one hand mixing the salad dressing for tomorrow.

As I have briefly discussed this before, the further we advance in the Piscine experience, the more evident is the difference between those who shouted for exhausting sprints and those who did plan on a long but steady run. And I will speak a bit more about this one in the HIGHLIGHTS section.

_WORKTIME: 12h

MATCH-N-MATCH

The morning started with the personal project defence. Given the complexity of the task and I assume, the elevated Cheat ratio for this project, there were 3 corrections required compared to the usual 2.

As for the Cheat part, it worth specifying the 42’s definition of the Cheat. As oppose to the traditional scholar system definition, at 42 the sneak pick and even copy of someone’s answer not considered as Cheating AS LONG AS you understood the code and can reproduce it from the scratch if required.

And to add to the already impressive list of “WHY THE STAFF @ 42 IS THE COOLEST STUFF EVER” the Match-n-match is the perfect occasion. As today’s students demonstrate the near perfect mastery of the google search (or a GitHub search in this particular case) staff decided to drop some cheat catching cheese. The supposed solution for the task was posted on one of the forums and (surprise surprise) happened to have a perfect set of key words to be easily findable. The one big BUT thought was the intentional omission of one of the conditions that did treat a particular case (that wasn’t the first to come to mind when running tests). So the code covered around 90% of possible tests but the resting 10 were not working as expected. And thus those who did blindly copy the answer without putting any effort of understanding (leave alone rewriting the code) were easy to find… And out, welcome to 42.

Oh and one more, if you submitted this exercise be ready to rewrite the code at any time, as one other way to re-certify that, the STAFF uses an “unplanned exam”  operation when all the semi-geniuses who submitted this one are persuasively invited to the Bocal or set in a cluster and kindly asked to write the code again. Those who can’t,  get the deserved -42. as a grade. So better get that one mastered.

DAY06

Relatively short and manageable topic following the high exercises density of D05  and the 24h D09. The topic is quite easy to grasp as well, which is around the Libraries and Argc/Argv parameters. If you have a good teacher around you should be all done with this day in 5-8 hours tops. For my part, I decide to add a lovely error message (which was not asked in the task sheet) and forgot to add the new line at the end of the message.  And s the “Moulinette is not much of an open-minded creature” (as it says on the first page of every Subject sheet) it did not appreciate the initiative when it doesn’t find a ‘\n’ at the end of the line. And so I got the so familiar “0” for the 4/5 exercises on the first submit. But as the error was fast to fix, the second time around I got the 100 I was shooting for. So just in one day I got from the level 4 to the next one (well 5% less than necessary).

_RESULTS:

_CHALLENGES: 0 entries (the geeks’ for “no inspiration”)

_SPECIAL COMMENTS: 0 entries (system maintenance, check again later/the geeks for “no inspiration”)