One of the “projects” of my bootcamp is to post positive reviews for them online?

Trying to grow a project from nothing is a skill on its own, "growth hacking". You have to be extremely talented at growth hacking to remain ethical but be successful at growing a project. I think Codesmith teaching people how to be good growth hackers would be much more effective then giving the templates and scripts to do it and just telling them to do because that's what you do at Codesmith and it's what everyone does. Like of all the growth hacking stuff I've seen in my career, asking people to write fake comments to hype your projects and embellish their usage of it, is middle of the road borderline sketchiness. Giving them a script to instantly clap 50 times is also kind of middle of the road sketchiness. Don't think this is necessarily across the line for most people. People in industry I've asked haven't really found this to cross the line. If anything I would think it's a little more interesting that it's masterful display of growth hacking for Codemsith instructors or leaders to have created this whole system as a growth hacking tool FOR CODESMITH itself... like publishing the number of GitHub stars as marketing, but knowing it is based off a pyramid of projects that ultimately have excited and optimistic new students in CSX doing all the "liking and starring"