The recent ICPC Prelims have raised serious concerns regarding the fairness and integrity of the qualification process. There have been widespread reports of teams receiving unfair assistance during the contest.

The main issue is not simply that some teams may have cheated. The bigger concern is that legitimate teams are directly affected by this.

A genuine team that solves problems honestly can lose a qualifying position because another team gained an unfair advantage. Since the Prelims determine who gets to participate in the Regionals, this can mean that a deserving team loses a major opportunity because someone else did not follow the rules.

The Problem with Relying Only on Plagiarism Checks

Post-contest plagiarism checks are important, but they may not be sufficient. Sophisticated cheating may not always result in highly similar code, and even if most cases are detected, a few undetected teams around the qualification cutoff can still make the final ranking unfair.

Instead of putting enormous effort into trying to identify every possible case after the contest, I believe a fresh and properly supervised contest would be a much more reliable solution.

Suggested Solution: Re-conduct the Prelims

I would request the organizers to consider conducting the Prelims again with a completely new problem set and stronger proctoring.

A practical setup could include:

• Proper physical invigilation at every centre.
• A second camera recording the room from another angle.
• The video can be privately/unlisted streamed on YouTube and shared with the organizers for verification.
• Standardized contest conditions for all teams.
• Normal plagiarism/similarity checks as an additional safeguard.

This would give every team, especially the legitimate ones who were affected this time, an equal and clean opportunity to qualify.

Also, re-conducting a contest is not unprecedented. A recontest was conducted for the Indian ICPC online round two years ago after serious issues with the original round.

I understand that conducting the Prelims again requires additional effort from both organizers and participants. However, I believe that is a much smaller cost than having even a few illegitimate teams qualify for the Regionals at the expense of genuine teams.

The strongest teams will be able to prove themselves again under fair conditions.

The goal is not to punish anyone. The goal is to ensure that the Regional qualifiers are teams that genuinely earned their place.

I sincerely request the organizers to consider a re-prelims for the sake of fairness and the integrity of the ICPC qualification process.