Boy, oh boy, the presentors would never get a job in our company: poor reasoning process, bad solution.

This problem is so simple that the whole solution is just one line of generic code (also with guaranteed complexity):

template<typename StringType>
inline bool is_palindrom(const StringType& str)
{ 
   return std::equal(str.begin(), str.begin() + str.size()/2, str.rend());
}

now you can instantiate the function on std::string, std::wstring, std::vector<char>, or whatever container is appropriate for your application, which has random access iterators. And if you need to make it case-insensitive, just add a corresponding binary predicate for std::equal, which is another one line of code for English, or can be non-trivial for other languages. You can even test for palindrom objects that are not strings, as long as they contain equality comparable types.