I have participated codeforces for 125 rounds. Yesterday's educational round is a good round for me, make me have a +69 rating, then I found nearly every educational round can make me gain good rating.
So I just grab my recent 50 contests, get the performance (which is obtained by carrots), and draw a graph, and find the interesting thing.
My educational round is far higher than ordinary rounds. 10 rounds total and average performance is 2170. My div1 only round is much worse than ordinary rounds, 5 rounds and average performance is 1771. Other rounds, average performance is 1943.
Does others have the same feeling, or it is just me, that div1 only is much easier to lose rating and educational rounds is much easier to gain rating?
Yes. In edu round, the contest are more likely to be speedforce, exponential force, etc. which means that a lot of people get stuck at D, E. Thus, their place is oftenly determined by their penalty. Therefore, if you are unlucky (you get a lot of bugs, etc.), you solved the problem very slow, get a tons of wrong submissions, we all know what will happen then. If you can write bug-free code for problem C, D fast, then good for you, you do be chilling in edu rounds!
So true. For me, I am very good at writing C and D in educational contest, but are very bad for E, and usually there is a huge gap between D and E. Also, unlike the ordinary contest that hard problems have high weight, all the problems are treated equal in educational codeforces. So solving easy problem in very fast speed will give you greater benefit.
Never heard of an exponential force round, what is it 💀
It's like $$$10000$$$ people solved A, B; $$$1000$$$ people solved C, D; $$$100$$$ people solved E and beyond. Basically the problemset is so unbalanced that the number of solves for each problems literally form a geometry progression that converge faster than tourist can do div. 2 ABC
Yeah you are right, there is something weird. Mine looks like this
Absolutely, there ain't a yellow ( Div1 only ) line. :D
there's a yellow dot though, lmao
I think it is kinda common. My performance also is usually better on EDU rounds. I had a 3 successive negative deltas on Divs 2 / 1+2 then came yesterday's EDU to rescue xD However, I wanna ask what tool you used to build this graph in blog (it looks cool and not simply built by excel or sth)?
I think he likely plotted the graph using matplotlib (a python module). Just a guess though.
I always get a huge rating loss in Div.1, like -85 and -47.
However, my perf is not as good in edus as well, getting -98, -80, -71, -28, and only one +60.
maybe i should just participate in normal div.2s lol
How to get this graph??
My thinking is that if you keep on giving contest prepared by same set of authors, you get used to their pattern. To check that, prepare a rating graph for all educational rounds that you have participated so far.
It's because you are educated...
...on too much DSA, gitgud at binsearch :)