This blog is about ACPC corruption, ACPC is the ICPC regional contest for students competing in Africa and the Arab region.
Sorry for posting this from a fake account, but as you will see in the video our team can be disqualified in case we used our real accounts!
We believe that ACPC is corrupted and in this video, we have included some evidence of this corruption
FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/ACPC-Corruption-104279088364028
We are students, we can’t afford to pay $1500 (the mandatory participation fees). We don’t understand why we are the only region where students have to pay these huge sums. All we want is a normal contest that students can afford its fees like any other region.
ACPC has set a deadline for paying the fees on 15/02 and till now there are many qualified teams that can’t afford these fees so this might be the last chance to make a difference and this can only happen with your shares and support.
FUCK , 1500 dollars for just participation . That's inhumane in name of education . Doesn't matter which country . In many parts of world people earn 500 dollars per month in job and this competition is for students and not for workers . INSANE
Even it would have been for workers, then also it's too much to pay for any contest.
What's extremely weird is that I just looked up Booking.com for the same hotel (a very extravagant hotel) around the same time for the same duration as the contest, and it costs around $500 for 2 people in a double room.So a team of 3 should pay something like $750 tops for accommodation. I don't believe that the rest of the contest activities warrant the remaining $750 at all!
I am the person who was in the video mentioned in the end and i was coach of two teams at that time and both of them were threatened to get disqualified after i posted my video. This shit has to stop.
The current state of ACPC is sad :(
Can I upvote this blog or I will get disqualified by doing that
Most probably you will get a warrant :)
I am sure you will get $1500 fine from Mohamed Fouad telling you that you will get banend from cf for such inappropriate behaviour to upvote such a blog again from Mr. Fouad.
During ACPC 2016, my team tried also to report all of this to the ICPC committee but of course we never received any valid response and then Mohamad Fouad threatened to disqualify our team.
We learnt at the time that both Lisa Donahoo (ICPC Global Contest Manager) and Bill Poucher (ICPC Executive Director) are aware of the situation but they chose not to act and report it us to Mohamad Fouad when we tried to reach out and apparently they are okay with the current situation.
This is unreasonable for the students for low income country.
1500$ is ridiculous for a participation fee.
Let's take a look at the ICPC world finals results through the past few years, especially at the teams representing the ACPC region : (results according to ICPC official website)
ICPC 2019 : ACPC region champions got 21st place
ICPC 2018 : ACPC region champions got 56th place
ICPC 2017 : ACPC region champions got 56th place
ICPC 2016 : ACPC region champions got honorable mention
ICPC 2015 : ACPC region champions got 64th place
ICPC 2014 : ACPC region champions got 45th place
ICPC 2013 : ACPC region champions got 60th place
ICPC 2012 : ACPC region champions got honorable mention
......
Moreover, these are not their actual standings in the contest, these are their standings according to the number of problems that they solved (without taking time penalty into account).
If they spend these huge amounts of money on sending these teams to training camps or maybe hiring some professionals to train them, maybe then they'll be able to achieve better results in ICPC. This region is relatively new to ICPC, most of the coaches were just contestants, they don't have academic people to train students. When a team achieves a relatively good result that's because the students themselves are extraordinary not because they got professional training.
Are academic teachers better for training ICPC teams?
For ICPC, I think an academic teacher won't be able to provide much, it depends on experience, hard work, and learning a lot of tricks and advanced stuff. To reach a level where you can learn this stuff is where academic teachers job is. In the Arab region, most of the coaches are either previous contestants, or academics who doesn't know a thing about competitive programming. Contestants will tell you to solve more problems and learn new stuff from coding more (which is not enough). Academics in this region don't know how to analyze/design an algorithm. So they won't provide much. If we had academic people who can give us the basics in a right way, to write clean and optimized code, to design an algorithm and be able to analyze its time and give a proof of its correctness. I think that will make a difference (an academic who was previously a contestant — that's a DREAM). Believe me more than 90% of contestants here just memorize algorithms and solve a lot of problems, waiting to see similar stuff in official contests. And that's why we can't solve more than 4/5 problems in ICPC world finals. I wish you could check previous problem sets in the ACPC region, but they don't upload them anywhere (I think that only one of them is in the gyms).
Boycott the contest.
How you convince hundreds of people to boycott the contest ?
For us we think this will never happen because some people have their university support so they just don't care about us.
At least they (ICPC) will see the decrease of participants count and universities count. They have a goal to grow in these directions last years.
Some other schemes:
This makes sense to decrease their benefits but still it doesn't solve the underlying problem which is why on earth we are required to pay 1500$ for students contest
That's not the underlying problem. You shouldn't, you obviously shouldn't. The problem is thus: how do we force it to stop?
Our plan is to keep pressuring the ICPC by exposing ACPC corruption. The more their corruptive practices are shared and published, the more pressure will be on ICPC to take an action. They will be forced to act to save their image as a non-profit organization.
I am skeptical. You have pressurized ICPC for years, this thread has been here every year since I remember and nothing has happened.
I think all the qualified teams for the ACPC 2021 should team up and boycott the contest !
The whole system is corrupted, as long as ICPC members gets a tour every year in beautiful Egypt, spending times in luxury hotels with company of cheap girls nothing will change, you think they don't know about this corruption? you think they do give a f*** about it? I hope that other regions members won't read your blog to follow these steps. I quit doing ICPC contests before graduation even thought I am international master at Codeforces and I can reach WF. I still do CP for fun, so either boycott the contest or stop whining every year about how these guys rob your money.
P.S: I am not writing from my real account because teams from my university might get disqualified for what I said.
Boycott will never happen. Consider a free spot at WF, not really everyone can refuse that.
So what do you suggest ?
I am actually one of the teams participating and i can't afford to pay the fees before the deadline !! The problem is, my teammates have no problem so i may be the reason that my team disqualifies !! I don't know how on earth does the ICPC organization not make anything about that through all these years of corruption unless they know and feign ignorance.
P.S: Of course that's not my real account.
I am planning the "Big Murder" today in which i will try to murder Mr.Fouad and then see whats in his bank ,anyone in? I bet in his bank he will have all the money and maybe some victims that tried to protest against him.
I know i know iam too harsh but noone (not even Mr.Fouad) can corrupt ACPC Dm me to know more details.
These threats are not welcome at all, even if you meant it as a joke!
MikeMirzayanov, please remove this comment!
I guess a good way to turn the situation around is getting in touch with the international organizers of ICPC, maybe someone like Bill Poucher, which I supose will be hard to contact. Just the fact that the fee is too high in comparison to other regions is enough of a reason for them to intervene. In Latin America the fee is roughly 50 dollars. Try contacting them through the ICPC page on facebook, linkedin, etc. Try contacting organizers from all around the world.
We sent an email to them which was signed by students that represent almost all universities in Egypt but we haven't received any reply at all.
Sorry to break it to you but you wont get a reply (again). Or at least the reply you will get wont be what you expected
I would say 350 as before was still too high but explainable because the poorer a country, the higher the fee. Like NWERC is participated by the world wealthiest countries with big companies funding, so it's free.
However, there is no denying that 1500 is daylight robbery. The best thing I can suggest is to contact universities in your region and organize your own regional even without recognition from ICPC. Why bother recognition from a corrupted organization anyway?
Although my school pays us for all kinds of icpc contests, I have just decided to not participate in them till graduation(in 2023) even if in that duration i got good enough to make it to WF. Will anyone else in the Arab/African region do the same?
Are they removing comments related to this from the ICPC Facebook fanpage? This is just sad.
If that's the case, I suggest that you can leave them a review: https://www.facebook.com/ICPCNews/reviews/
We didn't try commenting there yet, did you try and they removed your comment ?
I saw someone else's comment pointing to this post this morning and I liked it, but I noticed that it was removed. Maybe it was removed by the author, but then I don't see a reason why they commented in the first place.
ACPC is extremely overpriced. They are wasteful and don't care about costs, which must be covered by participants. Or they are simply corrupt and it's a very yes-profit organization.
While I can understand removing negative comments in ICPC/ACPC facebook page, I can't comprehend the threats of disqualification for speaking up online. That's evil and I hope it's illegal. Also, ICPC is equally guilty for ignoring the community and not responding to emails.
That being said, I didn't like the video and this whole blog. There are no links and tbh I couldn't find online any official pricing or even the schedule of upcoming contests. The video contains small silly parts like "you need to agree to travel to an expensive city". Should we ban contests in New York too? Generally, it's understandable to require a particular place and even a hotel — that means an easier organization and an ability to hold events by sponsors there. It becomes bad only because of enormous fees, as 500$ per person is indeed very expensive and organizers should find ways to cut costs.
My team qualified to ACPC... due to covid situation, not all countries allowed to travel in order to participate onsite.
So ACPC organizers decided to allow teams to participate online this year. but they will lose their eligibility to qualify for the ICPC world finals
Apart from qualifying, guess what? the fees to participate online is also 1500$
And when we were discussing why the hell we supposed to pay if we can't travel and will participate online. he said that participating online will cost him even more than onsite because he gonna assign some judges to watch the system during the contest :)
No comment.
If you're participating online and not aiming for ICPC this year then even 20$ is not worth it in my opinion, the whole point of ACPC is an onsite contest that includes the whole region, if you take that away then it's another gym contest.
Online ICPCs in china costs 100$, where participants do advance to WF.
Thanks for making the video, there are couple of things I'd like to add
Fouad is a smart guy, he saw the potential of this contest and he expanded it beyond the point of the contest itself (which is just a programming contest). He added a political dimension to the contest by inviting very important people in the Egyptian government and different politicians. He hosts the contest in a very extravagant venue which hosts some of the most important events in Egypt which are attended by the Egyptian president. He was able to publicize the contest by inviting mainstream media to cover the contest and do interviews.
The contest became a very important event that for example universities from Syria with very VERY limited budgets are sending as much teams as they can to show off and gain political points. The first lady Asmaa Al-Assad meets annually with the competitors and there is huge mainstream media coverage for it.
Even in Egypt, private universities and some other public universities are happily paying the fees for their teams because they know the publicity potential of this contest. IIRC, Ain Shams Uni. (which is a public university in Egypt) paid once for 6 teams to go to ACPC, although only one team can go to ICPC.
The contest isn't about programming anymore, ZERO of the contest fees go to the problem setters. The quality of the problems is usually extremely disappointing, and as much as we've complained about the problems before, nothing changes. There are a lot of technical issues that happens in the contest, random outages for some computers, random process crashes, sometimes you don't find all the IDEs installed on the pc, in one competition I remember someone finding codes on the pc from the previous year's competition as it seems they didn't even bother to wipe out the pcs before the contest. And then you find Fouad bragging about another flawless competition, not because he's trying to hide these issues, it's because they're not even on the radar, this is not what the competition is about anymore.
Furthermore, Fouad managed to link competitive programming to working at big tech corporations. In the early stages of the competition, Fouad was claiming falsely that the contest is sponsored by Facebook and Google, and had their logos all over the banners and ads for the contest. Fouad frequently uses examples of competitors who got top places in the competition and were able to get jobs at big tech corps. There were even rumors spreading around when I was in uni that the contest is attended by tech recruiters from Facebook, Google, ... and they're offering positions to almost all the participants.
Now there is a huge belief in Egypt (maybe all the arab world) that the contest is THE way to get into a big tech company. While problem solving skills is definitely a requirement, it's not the only requirement. And the level of problem solving skills that is required to pass a tech interview can be achieved without getting into competitive programming.
Fouad and his allies used this belief even further and the arab youth desire to get out of their countries by creating training academies that teaches people problem solving and even coding for anyone from any background with CRAZY fees for the content that is being discussed and for the instructors that have cyan or green ratings on codeforces (no offence to cyans or greens). And a lot of people register for these trainings and pay those fees for the false promise of getting a job at a big tech company.
Now what is the solution? Boycotting seems like an effective solution, however, it's very hard to convince teams whose fees are being covered by their universities to join the boycott. If the boycott is only done by teams that are forced to pay for themselves, I can imagine universities that are eager to be represented in the contest or universities that already pays for 6+ teams will happily take those seats. Nevertheless it will be also hard to convince all these teams to agree to boycott since a lot of them believe that this is their way to secure a job at a big tech company.
It seems to me that the only solution is in the hands of the ICPC committee, which doesn't seem to give a shit or maybe is in on the whole thing.
Thank you for speaking up Amr !
I can comment on the DISAPPOINTING PROBLEMS part since I was a previous setter.
The thing is there is a chief judge, this chief judge is responsible for the problems however since setters get nothing there is a pool that is sent publicly I GUESS.
The thing is the pool in itself is disappointing the problems are either of bad quality or unsolvable and since there is no money in it MOST of the problem setters are not that experienced both in setting and solving also the chief judge is most of the time really old and kind of outdated since the ACPC prefers a chief judge that they fairly know.
So an Outdated Chief Judge + a disappointing problem pool + 0 FUCKING PERCENT support or help from the ACPC to the setters is kind of a recipe for disaster It's actually kind of a miracle that the ACPC produces SOME good quality problems.
I can't understand the reason to have an "Outdated chief judge" Most of the times the chief is someone who quit competitive programming long time ago, This years chief judge has only 3 submissions on codeforces since 2020, and he is inactive in the last 5 weeks, I am not judging his CP skills but I think CP is not in his interests anymore.
In the Arab region we have lots of active users +Master level who can make a reasonable great problems. Once someone told me that they only chose chief judges and judges who work for big companies to keep spreading the lies that big companies will reach for you if you participate in the contest, they even faked my job description when I was a problem tester in some previous contest.
They want another 1500$ this year, I'm from a public university that can't sponsor us. My father's salary is nearly 400$, apparently I have to ask him to take a loan to be able to pay the fees of this contest ! Is programming only reserved for wealthy people in African and Arab countries ??? They just took away from us the opportunity to do the thing we love the most which is COMPETITIVE PROGRAMMING, we did not ask for much, we don't want no money we just want to participate without paying the MIND-BOGGLING 1500 DOLLARS..
What a scandal ! SHAMEEEEEEEEEEE on you ICPC for standing by and watching this theft taking place year after year ....
No, you just need a laptop.
No they didn't, competitive programming isn't about ICPC, ICPC is about competitive programming, and it's not the only thing that is about CP.
The main attraction of the ACPC is competing with top teams from the same region on the same floor, and while this is a very nice thing and ACPC is currently the only way to have this, in the end it's just an extra experience that you can have in the world of CP, it's not something they have taken away from you but rather something extra they didn't give to you.
Yes, ACPC is currently (and I would assume until another non-ICPC related onsite regional contest for Arabs appears) only for rich and sponsored people, but again it's only an extra experience. If your goal was ICPC or ACPC then yes that is very annoying and frustrating, but if your goal is CP in general then you haven't missed that much, at least that's my opinion.
Damn! This doesn't make any sense. I live in India and here this fees is LITERALLY around $13. And these guys are taking more than 100 times that?? Feels bad that people are not able to compete just because of some organization that wants to make profit.
I think it's a lie...
I'm worried about you, someone has to teach you how to google!
Actually more :) Check this Blog
it's unfair what you are doing , 1500$ are too much for students, it's a competition to gain experience and improve students skills not to gain money, so the competition lose its taste and the students lose this chance which is a dream for the most of them. That's why i'm asking for ICPC to interpose and find a solution to stop this profiteering.
Imagine working hard for 2 years practicing and learning for the competition and when you get qualified from ECPC to ACPC finally you can't participate because you can't afford those 1500$
Why don't you add old references to the post? That will help people recognize that this is not a one-off event.
https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/72555
1500 dollars for participating in contest is absurd amount! The guy who set such a fee should be banned from using money
Two years have passed and nothing happened, and here we are with the same problem, and I think the other contestants from the other regions felt it when they know that the world finals would be hosted in Egypt at a high cost.
ICPC 2022 and 2023 World Finals will take place in Egypt
Firstly, I respect your courage saying these words from your main. Sorry for using fake account but I risk getting disqualified or something and I don't have many tries left. Beyond the high fees, some problems on some qualification days / ECPC and even I heard ACPC from some qualifiers to ACPC are of low quality (poor testing) for ex wrong answer solutions may get ac and correct solutions may get wrong answer. I experienced myself a constructive problem having multiple solutions and my correct solution (Verified its correctness using stress test) got rejected and wasted my team lots of time.
Well, I see this blog https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/91095 mentioning ACPC2020 problem set was poor. It's a disappointment years passed, people discussing same talk and nothing changed at all.
Poor problem setting and even problem leaks taking place there.