Hello codeforces!
I recently began to notice that my rating began to drop significantly. I couldn't even solve 2 problems from yesterday's Division 2, although the number of people who solved B or C exceeded 18,000!
This is already the 4th contest where I have lost my rating. This won't do anymore. My goal is to reach a rating of 1200 before the summer.
Can anyone tell me what topics, and in general, what should I do in order to reach a pupil in such a time?
Thank you in advance and wish you all the BEST!
Plus, I want to continue blogging about my progress in CP:)
List of topics needed to reach pupil:
What about programming topics?
You should be good with the syntax of your language and you should know when to use things like sets/dictionaries to reduce time complexity. Also learn binary search.
Practice. D2A/B often don't need more than some neat observations. Perhaps binary search will be useful, but std::set will usually suffice.
cry
Codeforces does not improve your programming skills if you're just starting out. I would suggest to get a good grip over language (C++ say) and understand fundamental algorithms (specifically greedy, number theory, dynamic programming, divide and conquer). Also, dont forget to 'upsolve' problems of a contest which you feel you can solve but couldn't during the contest.
PS: I was thinking of creating a blog for beginner CPers. Let me know if I should.
You really shouldn't — there are already $$$10^{37}$$$ blogs out there on this topic, and beginners would benefit more from actually solving problems rather than another "how to practice" blog.
If you train more, you'll grow up. I wish you good luck.