What is TSA?

TSA is a US student-led organization with over 1000+ members at my state-level conference. I signed up for it in my state because it had an event called "Coding," which I thought would be pretty trivial to place in, as people told me it was simple programming problems.

Looking at past problems, they were at most 800 difficulty, so I thought it would be smooth sailing...

My Story

We were given 5 stupid, well-known casework problems for the final round. These were literally 800 rated max, and I speedforced them all in 15 minutes. Then came the judging of our solutions — instead of using a DOMJudge or any online judge, my State Level TSA people decided to have a person who would come up with testcases on the spot, and then yell them out loud to every other team as we were being graded.

The overall judging process for 5 simple problems took more than TWENTY minutes, as we were arguing with the judges about the problem statement being misleading. For example, one of the problems was to check if a given string is a palindrome; however, the test case we were given to be judged on included spaces and punctuation that were to be ignored, without any mention of such a rule in the problem statement.

The team that submitted behind me ended up having a 25-minute period where they heard all the testcases and arguments we had, and then immediately ran them and fixed their programs, essentially securing them the first place. My team, on the other hand, got two WA verdicts due to stupid problem statements.

Still, I thought that I could resubmit and still place with a slight time penalty; nah, my TSA decided that teams only have one try to submit all 5 problems at the same time. So, I ended up getting dead last, 12th out of 12 eligible teams. Everyone else got all the cases right because THEY WERE YELLED OUT BY THE PROCTOR!!!!

5 Star Experience Overall

Ngl this post is cope im just washed