usaco-guide/content/2_General/Practicing.mdx

---
id: practicing
title: How to Practice 
author: Many
description: How to practice and when to read editorials (analyses) according to various USACO competitors.
---

Knowing when to "give up" on a problem and start reading its editorial is challenging. Below are the opinions of various individuals. Note that "give up" is in quotes, because one still learns when they "give up" and read an editorial!

## Darren Yao (Intro to USACO 1.3)

Reaching a high level in competitive programming requires dedication and motivation. For many people, their practice is inefficient because they do problems that are too easy, too hard, or simply of the wrong type. 

In the lower divisions, most problems use relatively elementary algorithms; the main challenge is deciding which algorithm to use, and implementing it correctly. In a contest, you should spend the bulk of your time thinking about the problem and coming up with the algorithm, rather than typing code. Thus, you should practice your implementation skills, so that during the contest, you can implement the algorithm quickly and correctly, without resorting to debugging.

In general, I think it’s fine to read the solution relatively early on, as long as you’re made several different attempts at it and you can learn effectively from the solution.

 - On a bronze problem, read the solution after 15-20 minutes of no meaningful progress, after you’ve exhausted every idea you can think of.
 - On a silver problem, read the solution after 30-40 minutes of no meaningful progress.
 - IMPORTANT: When you get stuck and consult the solution, you should not read the entire solution at once, and you certainly shouldn’t look at the solution code. Instead, it’s better to read the solution step by step until you get unstuck, at which point you should go back and finish the problem, and implement it yourself. Reading the full solution or its code should be seen as a last resort.

Problems that you practice with should be of the appropriate difficulty. You don't necessarily need to complete all the exercises at the end of each module, just do what you think is right for you. A problem at the right level of difficulty should be one of two types: either you struggle with the problem for a while before coming up with a working solution, or you miss it slightly and need to consult the solution for some small part. If you instantly come up with the solution, a problem is likely too easy, and if you're missing multiple steps, it might be too hard.

[This](https://web.evanchen.cc/FAQs/raqs.html) and [this](https://usamo.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/math-contest-platitudes-v3/) are two blog posts by Evan Chen that I find quite insightful. They discuss such things as time management, the problem-solving process, and other tips that you may find useful. See [my website](https://darrenyao.com/beginner) for more information.

## Nathan Wang

My personal opinion is that it is okay to give up early when solving CP problems.
Sometimes I spend as little as 15-20 minutes on a problem before reading the editorial
or at least glancing at solution code. Other times I may spend significantly longer.

CP editorials generally aren't the best (with the exception of USACO editorials,
which are pretty good) so I often spend a lot of time trying to understand the
solution even after "giving up" and reading the editorial. I think it's good
enough to implement the code without having the editorial open.

My justification for why I think it's okay to give up so early is as follows:

- Getting frustrated and quitting CP for a week is worse than giving up
  - Whenever I feel like I'm really frustrated with a problem, I read the editorial
- CP editorials are usually difficult to understand, so you will still have
  to spend a lot of time reading and understanding them
- You learn a _lot_ by reading editorials
- If you can solve a problem without reading the editorial, that means you
  probably could have solved the problem in-contest too, so you didn't actually
  learn that much. However, if you didn't know how to solve a problem and
  you read the editorial so now you do, then you've learned a lot more.
  - In other words, reading editorials is a _good_ thing, not a bad thing!

Overall, I would just say to "give up" when you feel like giving up, whether that's
in five hours or in 15 minutes :)

## Siyong Huang

There are two ways to grow from solving a problem:

### 1 - You learn a new idea/algorithm from it.

You learn ideas from problems you cannot solve. This means that you *need* to read an editorial or someone else's accepted solution. Please try to understand the editorial; it's an important skill to have. You should be re-reading it multiple times and walking through various examples. If this fails, read someone's accepted solution (try to find one that is easy to read, if possible) and figure out what it is doing. If even this doesn't work, ask the author of the solution to explain their logic or specific parts of their code. Trust me, many are extremely happy to help someone who has made an effort to understand the editorial and has used their code as reference.

Furthermore, there have been countless cases where people have asked for help before reading the editorial. We will just link the editorial or repeat it for them, which is pointless.

Finally, hints are extremely overrated in my opinion. Just read the whole solution. You don't gain anything from reading part of a solution then finishing it out yourself. As long as you implement it in the end, you are still learning the same thing.

### 2 - Your implementation speed and consistency improves.

The best way to do this is to solve a bunch of easy or moderate difficulty problems. Try to solve them as fast as possible, as if you were in a contest. Perhaps take virtuals or time yourself when solving problems. Whichever you choose, the more problems you solve, the better you will become.

## Benjamin Qi

If you're still coming up with new ideas, keep thinking. Otherwise, you have several options:

- Look at [part of] the solution. (If CodeForces, look at the tags.)
- Leave it for a while and do something else if you actually want to solve it on your own.
- Get a hint from someone else.

I'm impatient, so usually I go with the first option. Sometimes I end up reading an editorial before reading the statement, but idk if this is a good strategy. :/ 

In any case, if you thought about a problem a lot during a contest but didn't end up solving it, then I don't see any reason not to read the editorial when it comes out (vs. continuing to think about it on your own). Also, you should always implement the solution afterwards!

## Nathan Chen

Read the editorial when you feel like you've stopped making progress; that could be from 1 to 5 hours. However, the most important part about reading the editorial is that you understand the topic and try to think about what similar problems look like. Being generally curious is a good way to practice algorithmic thinking.

## William Lin

I follow three guidelines (from most important to least important)

1. Having fun, just doing whatever you feel like doing
2. Spend about the same amount of time that you would be able to during a real contest
3. Whether you are making progress or not

## Eric Wei

I think the most important thing regarding practicing is to try to get something out of every problem, whether it's a new algorithm or idea, an implementation trick that can help in the future, or just a bug you hopefully won't mess up in the future. That being said, editorials are more useful once you've been stuck for a while; I think the exploration that happens from being a little stuck is often instructive (and good practice for contests, when it's your only option). But at some point the problem's more frustrating than helpful, and sometime before this is probably the right time to take a hint or read the editorial.

## Additional

 - [E869120 - A Way to Practice CP](http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/53341)