Why is the cumulative time for all submissions used for ranking in educational rounds? Doesn't it make more sense to take the time of the last correct submission for ranking? The order of the solved problems should not be relevant in my opinion, if X solved A-D in lesser time than Y then X should be ranked better than Y irrespective of whether X solved the tougher or easier problems first. Are there cases where the cumulative score makes more sense?
Edit: On more thinking, I guess it discourages people from solving and sitting on solutions till they have a certain number of solves.
Auto comment: topic has been updated by machhra (previous revision, new revision, compare).
It's the ICPC Style Ranklist. I like it mainly because we get to know if some higher index problem is actually easier than lower index problem. Imagine struggling with D whole contest and later realizing E was much easier (because people knowingly didn't submit it till the last moment). :(
Like you said, tourist holds back his submissions (in codejam finals) till the last moment to not give away the actual difficulty of the problems. It's a sly but effective strategy i guess.
Tourist is top-top contestant, that can be (almost) 100% sure in correctness of his delayed submission. Imagine holding to 4 problems and then finding out that some aren't correct. Not many people can take that risk
Yes and Harder problems should have higher points.Like example in educational round 106, user- Neal solved hardest problem which no one solved in contest but he got rank 21 despite having same points of rank 1.
Yet one may argue that the rules are exactly the same for everyone and this makes the contest fair. Nobody forced Neal to focus on the hardest problem.
Also WA, TLE, RE will have much more effect if we consider classic 10 min penalty.