Study 01
32%
of competitions appear with less than a week left to enter.
Checking the platforms once a week is therefore not a strategy: by the time you look, a fifth of what appeared has already closed.
- 917
- Listings measured
- 18d
- Of daily archive
- 11.5d
- Median notice
- 12%
- Under three days
By platform, least notice first
Platforms differ more than you would expect, and the ones with the largest catalogues are not the ones that give you the most warning. Only platforms with a sample worth reporting appear here.
Devfolio
7.6 days median38% under a week · 13% under three days · n=8
Unstop
10.9 days median33% under a week · 11% under three days · n=626
Internshala
12.7 days median25% under a week · 9% under three days · n=127
Codeforces
14.5 days median25% under a week · 13% under three days · n=8
Devpost
15.9 days median34% under a week · 24% under three days · n=116
Method, and what it cannot tell you
First seen, not published
Every listing is stamped when it first enters our archive. For anything appearing after the archive was already running, that is within a day of the platform publishing it. It is a proxy, and it can only ever overstate the notice given, never understate it.
The archive's own first days are excluded
Listings recorded in the first 48 hours of the archive are dropped, because for those the stamp records when we started looking rather than when the platform published. Including them would make every platform look worse in exactly the same way.
Medians, not averages
One competition announced six months out would drag an average up and describe nothing. The median says what a typical listing does, which is the number a student needs.
Sample sizes are printed, and small ones are withheld
Every row shows its n. Platforms below eight observations are not listed at all, because a figure from five listings is an anecdote wearing a percentage sign.