tweety's blog

How do you keep up with school AND competitive programming?
By tweety, history, 8 years ago, In English

I'm a high school student. I started competitive programming last year and since then my school grades got significantly lower. Competitive programming (especially for a newbie like me) takes up your whole time. I would have thought that the level I got to is enough for now and I can continue practicing after finishing high school, but I feel like I shouldn't since I qualified for IOI this year.

Do you think that for someone like me competitive programming is more important than high school grades? Don't get me wrong, I do love maths and physics and I am good at them, I just can't manage to keep up with other subjects.

For skilled competitive programmers who are in high school. How do you keep up with school? Does competitive programming eat up more time than school, and do you consider it to be more important?

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8 years ago, # |
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Wait till you get to university, it's where how much you love Competitive Programming vs your attendance/grades starts to appear. :P

Generally though, during exams/busy days, just focus on keeping your current progress. (i.e. train to keep your current level). In school, I think you should have plenty of time during weeks that are not right before exams, or during it.

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8 years ago, # |
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Competitive Programming > School :D

Actually now I'm in 9th grade and my grades aren't really good, but still I do have an average person's grades. I have to note that I study only when I have exams for about half an hour, so my grades are "expected".

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8 years ago, # |
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You are going to IOI and if you get a good medal and apply for univesities they will easily accept you , and as you said here , your grades are not important for them (at least for foreign univesities )... so Why do you need your school grades :D

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Foreign universities won't know how meaningless our grades are, and they would expect high grades from whatever educational system you're in :D

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      but not from and IOI medalist ...

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        I have a friend who's an IOI and APIO medalist and got rejected from all top schools to which he applied... probably because of his low school grades.

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        UPD: He got admitted to Amherst College. Turns out you're right.

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8 years ago, # |
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Well, I am facing the same problem. I simply don't keep up with school, I really hate what we are learning and our educational system. For example, during a typical history class in my school, the teacher shows us a presentation with like 7-8 events and 2-3 sentences about each and we take notes. What would you learn from that? You learn the names of those events and memorize some sentences, nothing more. You don't really know anything about the events, you simply remember some things and I don't think those memories will last too much. In my opinion it's much better to spend a whole class on a typical event, yeah, you will go through less events but at least you would be able to say that you know what you have learned, right? And this is just an example, those things hold for almost everything. I try to keep up with that but memorizing random years/sentences simply isn't my thing. And yeah, by random things I mean random. They are not really random but they look like that the way they are served to us. A fact "In year X, event Y took place" comes out from nowhere. Of course, if event Y took place in year X, there are some reasons for that and of course the event had some consequences. But those things are not mentioned, what they want from you is to remember X and Y. Don't get me wrong, I like our history, what I don't like is the educational system. So, I try to become better at competitive programming because I like it. And yeah, everyone should have some general culture (Is that the correct phrase? I hope you understand what I mean.) so I try to read about our history and country, also sometimes my parents tell me about some personalities from our history and explain what they have done during their lives in short. I find those moments much more useful and interesting. The sad things is that universities don't think like that and yeah, obviously I most likely won't go to MIT or something like that (sad). I hope that employers won't care about your marks and your university but your skills in the sphere of programming you want to work in. But if they care, then bad for me :)

PS: Now I see what my friend radoslav11 has written: "I study only when I have exams for about half an hour". Yeah, that's pretty much what you should do to get good grades in our country and pretty much what I DON'T want to do since I care more about the knowledge I will gain. I also have not-so-bad grades but not-so-excellent at the same time :)

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    It is not only your country which uses that kind of education system (same in our country :D). And i think that the method "studying for exams before half an our" is the best choice under these conditions.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    General knowledge*

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8 years ago, # |
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Same problem with me, Before i started competitive programming my university average was 91.57 and i was the first student in all my classes, but now it's just 83.20 and I am fifth :(

Competitive programming is something great and passionate, but you should also give a lot of time to your school/university, however i think 60% of your time for Competitive programming and 40% for your school, is something enough for both of them ^_^

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8 years ago, # |
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At least All of you are getting to read Physics or Maths in University.Despite taking computer science,we are taught topics which are miles apart from coding,let alone competitive coding. Assignments are given to us telling you have to write it in no less than 50-60 pages....

Though there have been good coders from my university but their percentages are well below 70% and (back in one or two subject) in college while average percentage of a student not doing coding is 85%...

Teachers too resent us doing any coding......

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8 years ago, # |
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i completely ignored the highschool since the begining of the 9th grade, i was 29/30 place in my class , if you sort acording to the grades.

but meh , i'm lucky , in Roumania entrance to college is guaranted if you got a place at national olympiad (or even better , just 1 participation is enough), national not IOI , haha.

I feel sorry for you that your universityes don't accept you based on your results !!! they should do it !!!

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8 years ago, # |
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Seems like whatever you do, it'll end up being a sort of gamble. If you focus on grades, you probably will perform less than to your full potential in IOI, and I don't have to tell you how strong the European contingencies will be. On the other hand, if you don't focus on school, you can be in a situation(no university) which you might regret for the rest of your life(or not :) ). If you do both(which you anyways will) you will be able to get into a college at least. Here's my solution — study for only one week before your school exams( it was sufficient for me, and I don't see any reason why it won't be sufficient for someone smarter than me ), and give your 100% attention to it during that time. And, give your 100% to IOI for all other days. Ask your friends to lend you notes, if you have good friends they'll make your exams easy(I am not suggesting you all cheat) . You can do it! You can do both! Life is not about choosing between great things, its about choosing to have it all, and then making smart decisions to get them all :)

All the very best to you :)

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8 years ago, # |
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  • In my last year of high school, I spent most of the time studying for university entrance exams. I was admitted to a university in Singapore, but failed to qualify to IOI. I regret not going to IOI a lot, but maybe it was the right choice, as Singapore positively changed my life.
  • In my first year in university, Vietnamese legendary competitive programmer ktuan (he was the only Vietnamese to achieve Topcoder target and many other stuff) asked me if I want to join his ACM team. I said no. I wanted some time away from competitive programming. I regret that for many years (just imagine you missed the chance being trained by Petr).
  • In my 2nd year in university, my ACM team went to ACM World Final. We did ok, but maybe we could have won a medal if I did not make unrecoverable mistakes in early contest. I regret spending time on university exams until now (my grades were higher than anyone I know in my batch).

Anw, I think a degree is important because of reasons mentioned in comments. But if you really hate university then maybe spend as little time as possible on it (just don't get kicked out). I had a friend who studied Material Science in university, then decided that its job is too boring, learned to code in a few months and landed a programming job. So I'm sure you can survive with low grades but good coding skill.

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8 years ago, # |
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I guess I'm in the same situation as you are. Got in an IOI team, thought I would practice like a super-something, and then the pressure of "study" came in :/. I hate IGCSE :'(

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8 years ago, # |
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Hello tweety me too I am a high school student from Tunisia and I think that bad school system is a common issue for arab countries :(

I enterd the world of competitive programming one year ago , before that I was just a good student who gets exellent marks in exams but I was seeking something challenging so I ended here ...

I am also preparing for IOI so if you are interessted we can work with each other (we are friends on FB you can text me if you want :) )

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8 years ago, # |
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I have the same problem... I'm not qualified for IOI though :D I wish I was.

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8 years ago, # |
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Life is too short to do what you dislike Follow your heart！

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8 years ago, # |
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If you are good in competitive programming, then your school won't care too much if you stay in home because of cf or tc round. ;)

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