What Actually Happened at the PW IOI Hackathon

Yesterday we participated in a 24-hour hackathon at PW IOI, the institute associated with Alakh Pandey and PhysicsWallah. I’m writing this because what happened doesn’t sit right. The event was supposed to start at 11 AM. The problem statement came at 11:30. Fine, no big deal. We picked one of the four projects and started building. All day and all night we worked. Around 10:40–11 PM, they suddenly informed everyone that submission would be at 7 AM. Not 11:30 AM. Not 24 hours from the problem release. 7 AM. And not just code submission... we had to deploy the project, record a demo, post it on LinkedIn, put that link in the README, and upload everything to their portal. So effectively, the “24-hour” hackathon wasn’t 24 hours. Still, we did everything. Deployed properly. Demo recorded. LinkedIn post done. README updated. Portal submission completed before 7 AM. Now comes the part that actually bothers us. Throughout the event, no mentor came to our team. Not once. And we weren’t the only ones...  at least 5 other teams around us were saying the same thing. There was an official WhatsApp group. We kept asking when mentors would come for evaluation. Whether we were assigned. Whether someone would review our project. There were long gaps with no answers. Meanwhile, other announcements like food and cafeteria messages were being sent in the same group. Results were declared around 12:40–1 PM. The teams selected were those who had direct mentor interaction. We simply asked: were we evaluated? We were told the results cannot be shown. Scores cannot be shared. No evaluation breakdown. Nothing. Our project was deployed online. After submission, we checked our backend logs and database entries. There were no unknown users, no external test accounts, no new activity except ours. We even tested the project from outside the venue to confirm it was working fine. When we mentioned this and asked if someone could open the project in front of us just to confirm it had been reviewed, we were told maybe it was an “API failure.” That was it. No verification. No checking. No explanation beyond that. Things escalated when multiple teams started asking similar questions about transparency. During that discussion, one faculty member physically pushed one of the students. He moved toward him aggressively and other students stepped in to hold him back. The whole thing was recorded. At that point, it stopped being about selection or rejection. It became about how students are treated when they ask questions. We’re not claiming we deserved to win. We’re not saying we were the best team there. If we were properly evaluated and didn’t qualify, that’s completely fine. But not being visited by a mentor, not being shown any evaluation proof, not being given clarity, and then seeing a student physically pushed when asking for answers... that’s not normal. If an institute promotes itself as student-first, then basic transparency and respectful conduct shouldn’t be too much to expect. If anyone else attended that hackathon, I genuinely want to know, was your experience different?