Hi, Ive been programming for a long time (I participate in FTC) and started competitive programming about 4 months ago. Ive made significant progress, starting out with leetcode and then transitioning to CF, then finally reaching USACO. I havent had any trouble solving the 2016-2021 problems from past contests and usaco guides (although i get stuck on the problems marked hard or very hard), but when i looked at the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 season problems, i was surprised to see that they are much harder than past problems. Ones like astral superposition had me lost, and most of them felt more like silver! Does anyone have any tips as to how i can do well in new bronze as to older bronze contests?
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Why has bronze gotten so much harder?
Two reasons include:
- The distribution of problem writers has changed.
- Problem writers don’t have access to solve statistics, so we can’t actually tell when a specific problem was unusually hard for contestants.
As for Astral Superposition in particular I believe the most similar module would be the following one in Bronze: Introduction to Greedy Algorithms