I have practiced questions from -
Codeforces contests/upsolving (~531)
CP31 sheet (till 1400) (~251)
USACO Guide (Bronze+Silver almost) Easy/Normal Tagged (~190)
Topic wise for Binary Search, Arrays, Summary Problems (~66)
CSES (complete Intro, Sorting, DP) (~57)
Codechef (1000-1400 rated) (~52)
Contests (~50 mostly div2/3)
in around 1.5 years during college :(
In dire need of help,
Pls suggest ways that can help -
grow/learn faster (pls be bit more specific than "solve more problems above your level")
manage CP with college while attending all the classes
Tried a lot of ways, none promising.
Thanks.
Auto comment: topic has been updated by brave_art_37 (previous revision, new revision, compare).
You answered your own question
You get nowhere without challenging yourself, most of the problems you've done >1400 are from usaco guide, which are easier than recent contest problems since you already partially know how to solve it and some usaco guide problems are old and have inflated rating
Also, have you read this?
I appreciate the comment. But as I stated, a little more specific advice would be helpful. And yes, I had read that blog and disagree with it. It’s hindsight bias.
Focus more topic wise to get solid foundation first!
Don't mindlessly do CP at first, its something you should do when you have digested many concepts (not just topics).
Thanks for the comment. I tried that with USACO Guide. Issues I face is that Greedy specifically or in general div2Cs are often NOT about specific topics. Otherwise, I will try that.
Actually, try to solve the more problems when you are solving problems from USACO, more codeforces or atcoder type problems because USACO problems and CF problems are quite different!
If you want to improve further, I believe that you should not stop what you are doing (solving problems above your level). The reality of it is that everyone has immutable limits, some people cannot reach $$$1200$$$ and some people can get $$$LGM$$$ with the same amount of work, and the vast majority of people fall in between on their own unique paths. Basically, it is what it is.
Thanks for the comment. Maybe you're right and I am just not meant for it. I have given all I reasonably could in time I had apart from college. If you have any advice for giving more time, I would appreciate it.
It depends on what you mean by "meant for it". If you mean getting a high rating, well that is relative, and there are some very high-rated users who still aren't "meant for it" in their eyes.
If you mean getting interview-ready, then just aim for expert and do some leetcode on the side. leetcode problems are more like the ones you'll see in $$$OAs$$$ and interviews.
Anyway, you can spend a lot of time doing it, but don't let it infringe on your other things, like classes and stuff. In $$$5$$$ years, you could still be doing competitive programming if you so choose, but you might not have the opportunity to do many of the things that you can do right now.
In a similar boat lol. Try to really piece apart what goes wrong during contests and or vcs. Do you usually get the idea but can't finish the impl? Do you struggle to come up with the idea at all? If its the former, you need to practice impl on mid level problems, and if its the latter then you have to spend time thinking about hard problems. If what you are doing isnt working, you have to change what you are doing, i think. Obviously not in the best position to give advice here but most of what i said is common sense.
Also keep in mind you have likely improved, but the cheating is bad, so gauge your improvement via past virtuals or what problems difficulty you have solved. Last summer i used to spend 2+ hours on 1400s but i can solve old ones in 20-45 mins. My rating is lower but it is what it is.
I think you should keep trying. As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I got into competitive programming a bit more than a year ago, and DP was a pain in the **s for me for a very long time. Recently I decided that I will practice DP every single day no matter what, just to finally get better at it. Long story short, today I solved my first 1900-rated DP problem, and it is one of the few high-rated problems that I solved fully on my own without hints. And I think the key, at least in my situation, was to choose one topic and focus on it for one or two months nonstop. Of course, you can(have to) still participate in AtCoder or Codeforces contests to practice other topics a bit, but your main focus should be one thing. For example: trees, graphs, DP, greedy, math, whatever. Just choose one topic and do problems from this topic every day. One or two problems per day is enough, but the important part is consistency. Do it every day for one or two months, and only after that move to another topic. It works the same as math at school. When you learn math, you don’t study geometry today, functions tomorrow, probability the next day, and then suddenly integrals. Usually, you take one chapter and work on it for weeks. You solve many similar problems, you start seeing patterns, and only after some time you finally get better. I think competitive programming should be practiced in the same way. Pick one chapter, like DP or graphs, and grind it every day for some period of time. After that, switch to the next chapter.