Hi :D I made this blog to ask a simple question and use your experiences, dear CF community.
I feel like Ive been stuck on Pupil for way too long... even though I participate in almost all contests and upsolve many of them. Ive got really close to Specialist but keep falling back. Can you give me some suggestions, or really anything that worked for you? Tnx
Pretty much all good people say that you have to work really hard. I have 2 tips from a book that could help you:
1. Good competing: Try to make an order for solving tasks. There are people that have, for example, solved a D task, but haven't solved the C task from that round. You should first read the task, and then sort the tasks by the value of points/time, where points is how many points you'll get, and time is how much time it takes you to solve the task. Of course, tasks that you know you can solve should have a bigger priority.
2. Good training: When solving tasks to train, you should try tasks that you aren't sure you can solve. Spend 30 minutes or more if you want, and if you just can't solve it, read the editorial. This can help you with a similar task in the future.
I hope this helped!
Tysm! Also solving tasks that I'm not sure I can solve was a nice one
i am also stuck in specialist for so long but yesterday reached expert
Gratz bro, you're not alone on that! :D
I experienced something similar. I was stuck in specialist and lower expert for a long time. But I kept practicing. Although there was no visual improvement (mainly in my rankings), I felt that I learned a lot of new stuff. Eventually I got out of the stump and kept improving. Recently I ended up reaching master (Although I dropped, I have a feeling I can eventually be consistent in being master if i keep practicing).
So my advice to you is, keep practicing. Even if there is no visual development, if you feel like you are improving, that's progress. It might be demotivating to not see any proof or concrete evidence of your improvement. But you should still keep going.
Another good advice is to change how you practice. Different methods work for different people.
Same Stuck in gray :(
start solving more 1200 and 1300 problem bro u will cross the 1200 mark then. U got this
:)
It's the most frequent question at this point, yet there's always something to point out. I won't speak about most common algorithms and stuff... but.
Have a pen and a notebook. When you are hitting the wall, just really really try to analyze the problem, search for different approaches, there could always be some sort of tricky simplification. You should learn to farm guessforces like this https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2003/problem/C, and I must say, YOU ACTUALLY DID GOOD on your latest contests! You are pretty stable at solving, only lacking speed, my guess is that you spend too much time to find the right idea... and aside the "practice more" there's nothing to be done.
...my personal suggestion you may disagree with: take a short break and try something different. Be it leetcode, acmp, timus, etc. Most importantly, try to have fun. Your level is in fact specialist. Also do practice on problems you thought you can solve but you didn't have enough time in the contest.
Actually, I have been stuck at Newbie for a long time. How can I improve?
u haven't solved enough problems solve more 1000- 1300 problems and u will cross 1200
Here is the ultimate Redpill I found
Some people do improve fast without much effort being expert under 3mo since start cf, being red under year. btw almost all red people become CM under half year
And some people do improve very slow or none, forever you can easily find many of such case, solve 2,000 problem in range of 1200-2200 and still suck at green or cyan. including me and many such cases.
There is nothing you can help
solve 2000 problem on cf will not help you
going over 200 hours of tutorial will not help you
reading 20 books about higher mathematics and data structure will not help you
cf is all about IQ, joy of young and talented kid and if you are not such people, I'm strongly suggest leave cf soon as possible. it's actually not good for you
Either Speak Good or Remain Silent.
either good or not, I'm telling the truth.
there is no special training or secret practice method in 2024. everything is open, and the practice methods of green coders, CMs, and red coders are not much different.
what make difference is actually IQ. for instance you will see that average iq of country coincide with average rating of country.
Can someone help me by giving me feedback on how to improve my rating? I am feeling stuck, I am unable to improve myslef, which results in making me stuck in Grey. This is also making me a bit frustrated.
What I do for practice -> I am solving this Sheet currently. I am currently practicing 1000-110 rated problems. I have solved the 800-900 rated problems from this. What I do while solving a problem is --> I first try to implement the intuition that first comes up, then I am either able to implement it or while implementing I realize my intuition is not correct, and after this, I just get stuck on one intuition, I am unable to think of any other intuition, I still try to come with an intuition which is very similar to I previously thought of. if I am unable to solve a problem after thinking for 30-60 mins, I look at the solution.
There are many times, when I am unable to think of any intuition and then I right away look at the solution within 20-30 mins
Like in the last Contest 969, I was unable to solve any problem, I started solving A and got frustrated when I thought my logic of finding coprime triplet, was giving WA. Then after feeling disappointed, I was unable to solve B, even though solving B required just a bit of observation
It will be really appreciated if someone can reply in this blog -> https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/133454, so that I can refer to it whenever needed, cuz I might lose this current blog.