I was searching for this question, but didn't find it anywhere. I was wondering that some contests with a minor hardness deflection in like Problem C & D is justifiable (where D is easier than C), but some contests literally have a big difference of hardness, yet they're assigned like that in a contest.
Some ex. of such Contests are :
Educational Codeforces Round 140
etc.
I was going through this blog to know, how ratings are assigned for problems in Codeforces, and broadly it's quite related to how many submission a problem is having with participants of various ratings.
Although, such contests, as mentioned above, are really very few if we see overall contests, yet out of curiosity I was thinking, don't they affect the rating of a problem actually? Because, if let's say C is harder than D, then a lot of people will spend more time on C & probability of solving D will decrease because of that, which will lead to an increased rating assignment to it, when it might not be even worth the rating.
So, my question is, is there an explicit check for such scenarios to rectify the actual rating accordingly and, why do problem setters decides to assign problem in such sequence, is it coincidental or intentional? Because with minor difference, it's understandable, but I don't think it's coincidental, when that difference is quite considerable.
Everyone has different understanding of the difficulty of the problem, so different people may rank the difficulty of the problem differently, and your idea may not work.
Sure. Hence the query. So, is it just coincidental?
Maybe not. I was particularly surprised by the difficulty ranking of questions C and D yesterday.
Sometimes, it is coincidental, sometimes intentional, but the thing is, nowhere is it explicitly written that the problems will be in increasing order of difficulty. Sure, they are in increasing amounts of points, that is given, but it isn't written explicitly anywhere that they will be arranged in increasing order of difficulty. That is why, it is always better to read all the problems (well, I read only up till C, because D and above require some advanced algorithms that I don't know more often than not, but I digress). It will take only, say, 5 more minutes, but it would pay back in points later.
Also, as the above user says, difficulty is subjective, if you feel that a problem is harder, it does not mean it is harder for everyone, and if you feel that it is easier, it does not mean that it is easier for everyone. So, basically this.