a
Is the RankManiac 2010 Contest Ethical? 
Thursday February 11 2010 01:54 PM

A current Caltech student recently posted this to an alumni mailing list:

For CS 144, the professor assigned a page ranking contest. The deal is, in two weeks the professor will Google the phrase "rankmaniac 2010", look and see who's at the top, and grade accordingly. Please help us climb to the top of the rankings! Our site is http://rankmaniac2010.org. You can link with <a href="http://rankmaniac2010.org/" title="RankManiac 2010">RankManiac 2010</a>.

How you can help:
1. Google "rankmaniac 2010" and click on our site (it's the .org one) (Maybe do this multiple times)
2. Go here and write a review for our Google Local listing. (This one is the easiest to do) (Not all 5's please, that looks sketchy.)
3. Check out our blog and comment.
4. Look at our Facebook page and become a fan. (requires Facebook account)
5. Write a review on Yelp. (requires Yelp account)(Again, not all 5's, please.)
6. Follow our Twitter. (requires Twitter account)
7. Link to any of the above, if you can, especially the main website.

Sorry to bother you, but our grades do depend on this.

I responded:

I will link to your site if it contains an insightful analysis of the ethics surrounding both assigning and doing such an assignment, including how such an assignment interacts with the Honor Code.  I will provide said link not too help you win but because I think such an analysis would be genuinely interesting and worthy of a link.
He has since added a Contest Ethics page to the site and blogged about the The Ethics of RankManiac 2010.  I think he makes a good case that his actions don't violate the Honor Code, but it still isn't clear to me whether it was ethical for the professor to conduct such a contest as part of a course, and I would feel very uncomfortable participating in such a contest personally. 

What do you think?  I've disabled comments here to prevent spam, so add your comments to the The Ethics of RankManiac 2010 blog post.



Syndication


Statistics
Entries (22)
Comments (196)

Feedback
Title 
Name 
URL 
Comments

I am a real person. You must check this to post your comment. Remember Me?
a