There is no official CodeVita syllabus — it is a competitive programming contest, so anything that fits in a six-hour window is fair game. But a decade of past problems shows a very stable mix. Prepare the topics below in order and you cover roughly 90% of what appears in Rounds 1 and 2.
Topic map by frequency
| Topic cluster | Typical problems | Round 1 weight |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation & simulation | Grid walks, game simulations, string parsing, date/clock arithmetic | Very high — usually 2 of 6 |
| Number theory & math | Primes and sieves, GCD/LCM, divisors, modular arithmetic, combinatorics | High — 1 to 2 |
| Greedy & sorting | Interval scheduling, heap-based merging, custom comparators | High — 1 |
| Graphs | BFS/DFS on grids, shortest paths (Dijkstra), connected components, topological order | Medium — 1 |
| Dynamic programming | Knapsack variants, LIS/LCS, grid DP, bitmask DP (Round 2) | Medium — 1 |
| Strings | Pattern matching, palindromes, anagram grouping, hashing | Medium |
| Geometry & bit manipulation | Points and polygons, XOR tricks, binary representations | Low — appears in Round 2 / finale |
Frequently reported past problems
These titles recur across seasons in student reports — solving each one is a syllabus in itself: Consecutive Prime Sum, Kth Largest Factor, Collecting Candies, Philaland Coin, Bank Compare, Jogging Track, Constellation, Minimum Gifts, Square Free Numbers, Sorting Boxes, Water Cistern, Obstacle Game, Prime Time Again, Football League. Three of them, with full solutions, are on the previous year questions page.
Skills that are not "topics" but decide ranks
- Fast I/O and exact output formatting — a trailing space or missing newline fails a hidden test.
- Reading long story statements — CodeVita wraps every problem in a narrative; extract the input/output spec first.
- 64-bit awareness — sums and products routinely overflow 32-bit integers.
- Edge cases — N = 1, empty input lines, duplicates, unsorted input.