You cannot cram CodeVita — but you can prepare it efficiently. Round 1 is won by solving the three or four approachable problems cleanly, not by attempting the hardest one. An eight-week plan that respects that fact is below.
Eight-week plan
- Weeks 1–2 — Language fluency & I/O. Pick one language and stay with it. Practise reading multi-line input, printing exact formats, 64-bit integers, and fast I/O. Solve 20 "implementation" problems — no algorithms yet.
- Weeks 3–4 — Core patterns. Sieve of Eratosthenes, GCD/LCM, prefix sums, two pointers, sorting with custom comparators, binary search on the answer, heaps. Redo Consecutive Prime Sum, Collecting Candies and Kth Largest Factor until you can write them without thinking.
- Weeks 5–6 — Graphs and DP. BFS/DFS on grids, Dijkstra, components, topological sort; then 1-D and 2-D DP (knapsack, LIS, grid paths). One problem of each per day.
- Week 7 — MockVita and timed sets. Attempt MockVita in one sitting; then two more self-timed six-problem sets from past seasons. Upsolve everything.
- Week 8 — Taper. Re-read your notes on I/O pitfalls and edge cases. Sleep. The day before Round 1, do nothing harder than one easy problem.
Round-day strategy
- Read all six statements in the first 20 minutes and rank them by how sure you are of the approach.
- Solve the two easiest first — a clean 2/6 in hour one puts you ahead of most of the field.
- Test with your own edge cases before every submission; a wrong submission costs time, not marks, but time is the tiebreaker.
- Give the hardest problem the last 90 minutes only if the first four are done.
- Keep a text file of your code — the session times out after 15 idle minutes.
Resources that match the CodeVita style
Past CodeVita problem sets (searchable by season), the NQT advanced coding problems for warm-ups, and any judge that lets you practise stdin/stdout problems with hidden tests. Skip LeetCode-style function-signature problems for the last month — CodeVita judges whole programs.
If you are also sitting NQT the same year, prepare CodeVita first: it covers NQT's coding section completely, and leaves aptitude and verbal for the final fortnight.