I'm not sure if this happens to everyone, but when I'm able to solve a problem in a contest (generally C in Div2) that was supposed to be a little challenging for coders rated like me in a very short time, I get a little too excited and lose focus, which causes me to repeatedly fail to solve Problem D's in Div2 Contest, despite the fact that I can solve them relatively very easily off-contest.
Is there a way to get past this, or I'll have to learn it with practice?
(road to expert)
Take a minute off from the contest if you want, and get back to D afterward.
this! almost every contest i take a 10 min breather to think about the harder problems(if i ever make it there) but ig it hasnt been working out too well for me haha.. considering my rating graph
your rating is beautiful ignore the haters
yours is beautiful too :P
You've got to be kidding me. You are CM in 21 months and 34 contests. Was it supposed to work even better?
How to solve C consistently? Sometimes I'm able to solve them with within contest and sometimes it seems impossible even after so many WAs on pretest 2.
You can't. There's always a chance to fail to solve a low ranked problem due to missing some important observation or building your solution on an incorrect assumption (which you totally believe is true until the contest ends). Even grandmasters may sometimes struggle with a low ranked problem during a contest, though this is very uncommon.
Coming up with relevant testcases during a contest and doing stress testing can mitigate the risks to some extent. This works great if the problem has a trivial bruteforce solution, which you can use as a reference implementation to compare against.
Another approach is to just skip a tricky problem and maybe get back to it later during a contest after you are done with the other problems. For example, in the last div2 contest I was switching between B and C. Didn't have any good ideas for B, so moved on to C. Got the right idea for C and implemented it, but my code was buggy and didn't even pass the samples. Moved back to B and solved it. Moved to C again and found the bug. Another example was the last div 4 contest. I got a WA on problem C, had no immediate idea about what's wrong with my solution and rather than just getting stuck there, moved on to the other problems. Returned back to C in the end.
try to start contests from D
Soon enough it will stop being exciting. Then your problem will be that you get too excited after solving D. And so the cycle continues.
I'm not convinced about "I can solve them relatively very easily off-contest".
It's natural
Slowly when this becomes more regular, it won't affect you much
You may try to remember that even though you might be expected to get +100 to +150 delta currently, others are trying out the harder problems and maybe it is not that hard
For eg. once I solved A B D1 in a div2 in 14 minutes and was ranked first in div2 for like 5 whole minutes and I only needed 34 points to get to master but was predicted like +330. So I completely lost focus and couldn't think on the other problems. By about 1hr 30 minutes, I was down to -20 and finally got -1 delta after solving C1.
So, once you realize the pointlessness of the same, and once it becomes regular for you, you won't make such errors.