devendra_sharma's blog

Suggestion for improvement in rating!
By devendra_sharma, history, 7 years ago, In English

Hey guys! As you can see i have been coding for a while now but my rating is not increasing. i dont know what to do. if any suggestion can be given by a high ranked person that would be beneficial. tell me how to practise. my ambition is to become blue or candidate master within 4-5 months.! Thanks.

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7 years ago, # |
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You should go to this link. http://codeforces.net/blog/entry/16599

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7 years ago, # |
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Hi friend. I know I'm not a "high ranking person" but I'll try my best. I'm in the same problem, but I feel that I have improved a lot and am slowly increasing not only my rating but my problem solving skills. From solving A and sometimes B, now I'm solving A, B and sometimes C.

The answer is simple: practice. I'm doing about 20 problems a day at least and doing all C and D problems I didn't solve in contests (of course, reading editorials after a couple of hours without success, and understanding the solutions).

The things that worked the best for me were:

  1. A full read of The Competitive Programmer's Handbook (or something like that, a free pdf) and Competitive Programming 3.

  2. A couple of online courses at Coursera and Edx.

  3. A2OJ ladders (based on your rating, a list of 100 problems scaling in difficulty, starting with implementation ones i.e. A and B, then to C and higher) A2OJ is a web platform FYI. Just a note, solving A and B problems fast enough will increase your rating a lot (but it will cap around 1450), so solving easy problems fast and without errors is a skill you must develop. I used to solve A and B in 25 minutes with a couple of WA, yesterday I solved them in 10 minutes without errors.

It is a slow process, but it is the process everyone must and had followed. There is no some magic that will make you a god.

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    7 years ago, # ^ |
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    Could you please tell which online courses you are talking about???

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      7 years ago, # ^ |
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      Edx: How to win coding competitions: secrets of champions The video lectures were easy and some of them medium, but the problems (8 each week, for 7 weeks) were excellent. I think you can access to them for a couple of months since it is archived now (or close to being archived until they decide to give the course again, I think they do it twice a year)

      Coursera: There are two algorithm specializations, it is the blue one (the logo is a blue binary tree) Again the lectures were pretty standard but the problems help you a lot.

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        7 years ago, # ^ |
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        The Algorithms course by Robert Sedgwick and Kevin Wayne from Princeton is excellent . But the programming assignments are in Java . You can also try Tim Roughgarden's course. The programming assignments are language independent.

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