Freshmen at Warsaw University tortured by Codility third year in a row

Yes, freshmen's life is not a piece of cake. Even before hitting the classrooms this year, freshmen at the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Mechanics of Warsaw University had to undergo a test on Codility to qualify for an extended course in introductory programming. (Too impatient to read the whole post? Go straight to the test.) Warsaw University's Institute of Computer Science is an alma mater of world champions in programming (ACM CPC 2003 and 2007), serial winners in TopCoder competitions (Eryx and tomek), as well as a hatchery for brainpower behind many successful software businesses, including... Codility. In 1999 smart folks at Warsaw University Computer Science decided that at least part of their first-year students is so fluent in imperative programming (remember, this is the crowd that wins International Olympiads in Informatics and the like in high schools), that it may not make sense to bore them with introductory imperative programming, but hit them instead with an alternative course that approaches programming from a declarative angle. First intended as an experiment, it soon proved to be a useful extension of the curriculum. Still, computers are inherently imperative, so the precondition was that you can skip the imperative programming only if you have mastered it. This was where Codility proved to be of help. Since 2008, near the end of September, freshmen log into Codility to solve the pre-selection test, that helps to decide whether they are good enough to skip the imperative programming course and get some more juice out of functional programming class. This year, again, Codility has proved its efficiency and suitability for preliminary screening of students, says Dr. Marcin Kubica, who teaches the declarative variant of Introductory Programming course. All the students have been qualified and registered to appropriate groups (on declarative or imperative programming) in less than 48h. Ability to take the tests at different times eliminated the need for fixed-time scheduling, so difficult to achieve during very busy beginning of the academic year. In this year's test 167 persons were enlisted, 103 participated, 56 qualified for the extended course, 4 scored 100% on all tasks (congratulations!). Want to try for yourself? Solve one of this year's problems!