Microsoft — Online Assessment: Pattern, Syllabus & Mock Test
Microsoft — Online Assessment pattern: 2 questions in 90 minutes across 1 section. Sample questions, a preparation guide and a free timed mock.
- Pattern: Microsoft
- Duration: 90 minutes
- Questions: 2
- Timing: Free — move between sections until the paper's clock ends
- Negative marking: None
Two problems on Codility. Below sixty per cent is an automatic no.
- Pure coding
- 60% is the reported floor
- One shared clock
Sections
| Section | Questions | Time | Kind | Marks each |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | 2 | 90 min | Coding | 10 |
Microsoft — Online Assessment syllabus
Coding: Microsoft coding questions 449 problems
Instructions
Microsoft screens on Codility or HackerRank: two coding problems in ninety minutes, and nothing that is not code.
- The reported scoring is blunt. Below sixty per cent is an automatic rejection; a hundred per cent is an automatic pass; between the two a recruiter reads it.
- Partial credit counts, so finish something rather than perfecting nothing.
- Trees, dynamic programming, arrays and strings are the usual ground.
India campus drives add a proctored secure browser, and some tracks add a separate skills assessment in Java and SQL. Neither changes the coding round.
How to prepare for this pattern
A guide to the Microsoft online assessment pattern: two coding problems on a platform such as Codility or HackerRank, and nothing that is not code.
What the paper looks like
One section: Coding, two problems of medium difficulty in 90 minutes on a shared clock. You can move between the two problems freely and come back to either. Each problem is worth ten marks and is graded on the test cases your solution passes, so partial credit counts; there is no negative marking and no multiple-choice section. The paper is not adaptive. The reported scoring is blunt: below 60 per cent is said to be an automatic rejection, 100 per cent an automatic pass, and anything between is read by a recruiter. Those thresholds are consistently repeated but crowd-sourced rather than official, and sources vary between two and three problems in 60 to 90 minutes, scaling with seniority.
How to prepare, section by section
- Coding. Trees, dynamic programming, arrays and strings are the usual ground. Tree questions are traversal questions, so practise recursion over trees with Depth-First Search and level-by-level work with Breadth-First Search, and get comfortable with Recursion itself. For Dynamic Programming, start with the one-dimensional problems and move on to two-dimensional tables over strings and grids. For arrays and strings, Arrays, Strings, Hash Table, Two Pointers and Sliding Window cover the patterns that recur. The DSA roadmap puts these in an order that builds on itself.
- Language. Write in the language you are quickest in. The Java, C++, Python and JavaScript study plans each cover the standard collections, which is most of what an assessment solution needs from a library.
On the day
With partial credit and a reported floor at 60 per cent, the aim is to finish something on both problems rather than perfect one. Read both first. Get a correct solution to the easier one written and submitted, then turn to the second; if its efficient solution will not come, submit a brute force that passes the smaller test cases before refining it. Forty-five minutes each is the even split, and the shared clock lets you move time from one problem to the other. Keep the last ten minutes for testing edge cases, such as empty input, a single element and the largest values, rather than for starting a new approach.
This mock is modelled on the published shape of Microsoft's online assessment, which is well documented in outline and crowd-sourced in detail; CodeKairo is not affiliated with Microsoft.
About this pattern
Well documented in shape. Two to three problems in 60 to 90 minutes across sources, scaling with seniority. The 60/100 per cent thresholds are consistently repeated but crowd-sourced rather than official.
Modelled on the published pattern; not affiliated with Microsoft. Every sitting draws a fresh paper from the aptitude bank and the problem catalogue.