How Are Problems Organized by Difficulty on Kattis?

Kattis groups problems into four named difficulty bands — Trivial, Easy, Medium, and Hard — and assigns each problem a numeric point value that increases with difficulty. On the problem archive homepage, the "Suggested problems" section lists one example problem per band alongside its score, so you can gauge the jump between levels before you start solving. If you are new, the practical approach is to start at the Trivial or Easy end and move up as your accepted-solution count grows.

The four difficulty bands and their point ranges

The homepage's suggested-problems list shows the following examples, which illustrate how the bands map to scores:

Two things stand out from this table. First, the bands overlap in score: a 2.2-point problem is still labeled Easy, while a 3.2-point problem is already Medium. The label is the primary signal; the score is a finer-grained tiebreaker within and across bands. Second, the gap between Medium and Hard is much larger than the gap between Trivial and Easy — the suggested Hard problems sit at roughly double the suggested Medium scores.

How to use the labels to pick a problem

The difficulty label answers "roughly how much experience do I need," and the point value answers "how much is this worth relative to its neighbors." A workable selection routine:

1. Match the band to your current level. If you are new to competitive programming, stay in Trivial and Easy until you can solve them reliably.
2. Use the score to fine-tune within a band. Inside Easy, a 1.4-point problem is a gentler start than a 2.2-point one.
3. Treat a band jump as a real jump. Moving from Easy to Medium, or Medium to Hard, is not a small step — the suggested problems show the score roughly doubling at the Medium-to-Hard boundary.

The "Suggested problems" list itself is the intended entry point: it exists so that a first-time visitor does not have to browse thousands of problems to find a starting point.

What the score is not

The point value is a difficulty indicator, not a measure of time or effort in any fixed unit. Two problems with the same score can require very different techniques. The homepage also shows a global ranklist where top users have accumulated scores in the tens of thousands (the top entry is 18,448.0), which tells you the scale is cumulative across many solved problems rather than a per-problem rating. Affiliation and country leaderboards use the same cumulative scoring, so a high rank reflects volume and difficulty of problems solved together, not a single hard problem.

Practical starting point

Register on the site, open the problem archive, and begin with the Trivial and Easy entries in the suggested list. As you clear them, step up one band at a time. The label tells you whether you belong in that band; the score tells you where inside it to start.