Hello Codeforces!

I've been a member of this community for about 1 year and i'm very glad of how things go there, with a single exception: Educational Rounds.

Ever since they became rated for div2 users, despite of their rather interesting format, they've proved to be a trap for many users, because of hacking period and contest format(extended ICPC). Basically, as a result, in 99% of situations, problem A, which is supposed to be the easiest one, becomes the most important problem, and this is not exactly good, because in many situations, people who have, let's say ABCD and a rather good penalty, end up getting only BCD but with a bad penalty for 3 problems, just because of a single mere error, while in any other contest they would only have gotten a small drop in standings.

Thus, my humble suggestion is to rethink a bit how Educational Rounds(and any ICPC style contest in CF with sorted difficulty problems, like div3 rounds) are working.

One of my ideas is to add weight to each problem, so instead of each problem having the same value (another point on number of problem solved), we can have something like A = 1, B = 2, C = 3 and so on, thus while still advantaging people who did ABCD, it will not hurt people who did something like BCD so much anymore.

Another idea i have thought at is while keeping the current system(people ranked by number of problem solved and penalty), we can add another criteria of separating people's ratings.

For example, a person who solves ABCDE should be better than a person who solves even DEFG, but a person who solves ABCD shouldn't be better than a person who solves, let's say, ABCE

What do you think of those ideas? Can they actually be an useful change for educational rounds and how does it work? Suggest any other ideas in comments and feel free to share your feedback.