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A complete guide for practising for your USACO test

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Alphastar Academy
A complete guide for practising for your USACO test

Read this guide to learn how you can effectively practice for your USACO contest and become better through USACO training online.


USACO training online could give you the best tips for practising for your competition. Reaching high levels in competitive computer programming requires motivation and dedication. For most people, their practice isn’t efficient because they solve problems that are either too hard or too easy or simply the wrong types of problems that won’t help them in any way. In the lower divisions, a lot of problems use elementary algorithms. Here, the main challenge is deciding the best algorithm to use and proper implementation.

 

In a contest, it is important to spend most of your time thinking about problems and coming up with the right algorithm rather than typing code. You should, therefore, practice your implementation skills so that during the competition, you can implement the algorithm correctly and quickly without debugging.

 

You should practice with problems that have the appropriate difficulty. You do not need to complete all the exercises at the end of every module. You should do what you think will be right for you. Problems at the right difficulty level should be either you struggle with the problem for some time before coming up with a solution or you miss it and need to consult the solution for the smaller parts you slightly missed. If you come up with the solution, a problem will be likely too easy or if you are missing multiple steps then it might be too hard.

 

Reading solutions

During your USACO training, you should know when to give up on a problem and read its solution. However, this is very challenging for most people. Do not find it shameful to give up because you will still learn when you give up.

 

Growing from solving a problem

When it comes to growing from solving a problem, there are two ways: you learn a new idea and your implementation speed improves.

 

You learn a new idea

You will learn new ideas from ideas that you can’t solve. This means that you will need to read someone else’s accepted solution or an editorial. You should always start by trying to understand the editorial. It is a very important skill to have. A concept or idea that is sufficiently difficult requires drawing various examples and multiple re-readings. If this does not work, you will need to either reach out or read solutions.

 

While reading others’ solutions is hard, it is an incredibly useful skill. You can look to a faster solution if your code is not timing out. There have been cases where the editorial solution was outclassed by a shorter and faster solution.

 

When asking for help, it is important to point out a specific idea that is confusing. You can answer general questions by summarizing the editorial. Hints are overrated. You should just read the entire solution.

 

Your consistency and implementation speed improves

During your USACO training online, you need to improve your implementation speed. The best way to approach this is to solve a lot of moderate difficulty and easy problems. You should try and solve them as fast as you can as if you were in an actual contest. You can time yourself when solving and see how better you will become.

 

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