The input format on hackerrank is given in this format;
3
Krishna 67 68 69
Arjun 70 98 63
Malika 52 56 60
Malika
Line 5: It means name variable will store only one value i.e name of the students like Krishna, Arjun etc, where as *line will store value like all the marks of a particular student like 67 68 69. So, here *line will store multiple values. And split() is use to identify separately all the space separated name and marks of each student.
Hope this will help.