I've bombed 3 coding tests in a row: am I the only one?
I failed my third one yesterday. Two were time limit exceeded, and one I couldn't even touch.
While solving, I'm like, "Oh, I can do this," but when I submit, it's always 12/15.
Seriously makes me wonder what the point of what I learned at the academy was lol.
6 answers
Agreed, I'm also a 12/15 regular lol those 3 are a real wall
But if you got Time Limit Exceeded twice, doesn’t that mean your logic was implemented correctly? That’s not nothing lol. It’s a much better state than not even being able to make an attempt.
Timeouts are almost always a data structure problem. Try rewriting the same problem with a hash map or two pointers. If you're at 12/15, you're only missing one condition or edge case, so you'll improve quickly.
Last year, I also failed five times in a row and fell apart mentally. From then on, I made a point of reviewing every problem I got wrong and wrote down one line about why it had gone wrong—things like the cause of a time limit exceeded or edge cases I missed. After about two months, I stopped making mistakes on the same types of problems. A streak of quick failures is often less a matter of skill and more a matter of being disorganized.