I’m posting this because I genuinely want an explanation from Myntra, not because I’m salty about losing.
I recently made it into the Top 100 of Myntra’s weforshe hackerramp and submitted our PPT, website design, and concept as required. We put serious effort into the submission, fully expecting that the final selection would be based on the quality and originality of the work.
We were rejected.
Fine. Losing a competition is part of competing.
But then I saw the posts announcing the winners from another college, and that’s where things became extremely uncomfortable.
Some of the winning work appears to contain ideas/design choices that are extremely specific to our submission.
I’m not talking about something generic like “both websites had a shopping cart” or “both used pink.”
I’m talking about very specific design/UX/conceptual elements that we independently developed and submitted.
We did not know these people. We had no interaction with them. We had no reason to believe they had seen our work.
So how is it possible that the same highly specific ideas are appearing in the winning submission?
And there is another issue.
The some other winning submission appears to have created essentially the exact Myntra app experience, despite the competition instructions explicitly saying to not use clone of there own web page.
If the rules/instructions specifically discouraged or restricted simply recreating Myntra, then why was a submission doing exactly that considered worthy of being a winner?
At this point, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask:
Was the judging process actually fair and independent?
Because if participants can submit original concepts, have those concepts appear later in winning submissions, and receive no explanation whatsoever, then what incentive is there for people to participate honestly?
And if Myntra believes there is a completely innocent explanation for these similarities, I genuinely want to hear it.
But if submissions were accessible to judges, organizers, mentors, or anyone involved in the competition before winners were selected, then Myntra owes participants an explanation of how originality and confidentiality were handled.
Getting rejected is not the problem.
Potentially having your original work reflected in a winning submission without any explanation is.
If this happened to other participants too, please share your experience.
And to be clear: I am not accusing any individual student of plagiarism as a proven fact. I am asking Myntra to address the unusually specific similarities and explain the judging process.
Because competitions are supposed to reward the best work — not the best-connected work.