An 8-week placement preparation plan for final-year students
For a final-year student with roughly eight weeks before campus drives and ten to twelve hours a week to give them.
This plan assumes four things: you are in your final year or just out of it, the drives you care about test the usual five subjects — aptitude, DSA, SQL, OOP and DBMS — you can find ten to twelve hours a week, and you have about eight weeks. Change the assumptions and the plan bends, not breaks: fewer weeks means fewer subject blocks and an earlier retake; more hours means a bigger daily set, not more subjects at once.
It is built on one rule from the placement preparation method: measure before you study. Every block below starts from a diagnosis, not from chapter one.
Week 1 — Measure everything, fix nothing yet
Spend the first week finding out where you stand. Try three questions in each of the five subjects on the site — free, no account — and notice which subject made you uncomfortable. Then sit one full diagnostic in the subject you are least sure of (if drives at your college are mostly service companies, that is usually aptitude; if they are product companies, usually DSA). Read the diagnosis and copy the primary gap and root causes into the top of your notes.
Daily set: fifteen practice problems, all on the primary gap the diagnostic named. Do not touch the other subjects yet.
- Two evenings: the five three-question tries, one subject per sitting.
- One evening: the full diagnostic, no notes, no pausing.
- Every day: fifteen problems on the primary gap, explanation read on every miss.
In a class of 80 students, 65% passed the mathematics exam. How many students passed?
- 155
- 252correct
- 360
- 448
65% of 80 = (65/100) x 80 = 52. So 52 students passed the exam.
Weeks 2–3 — Aptitude and SQL
Aptitude and SQL share a property: they are both speed-and-shape skills that reward a small number of methods practised until they are automatic. Put them together. Alternate days — aptitude one day, SQL the next — and keep the sets timed, because the placement test will be.
For aptitude, work the families in this order: percentages and the profit-and-loss and interest problems built on them, ratio and proportion, time and work, time-speed-distance, averages, then probability and number systems. For SQL: joins and the rows that survive them, GROUP BY with HAVING, subqueries, NULL handling, and — if product companies are on your list — window functions. Each family has a topic page here with the questions interviewers ask and the method worked through.
- Aptitude days: three timed sets of five problems, then the explanations for every miss.
- SQL days: write every query by hand before checking; say what each clause removes.
- End of week 3: retry the questions you missed in week 1's diagnostic without looking at the answers.
Table Departments(dept_id, dept_name). Table Employees(emp_id, name, dept_id). Which query returns all departments, including those that currently have no employees?
- 1SELECT * FROM Departments RIGHT JOIN Employees ON Departments.dept_id = Employees.dept_id;
- 2SELECT * FROM Departments LEFT JOIN Employees ON Departments.dept_id = Employees.dept_id;correct
- 3SELECT * FROM Departments INNER JOIN Employees ON Departments.dept_id = Employees.dept_id;
- 4SELECT * FROM Departments, Employees WHERE Departments.dept_id = Employees.dept_id;
A LEFT JOIN keeps every row from the left (first-listed) table even when there's no matching row on the right, filling the right-hand columns with NULL. Here Departments is listed first, so every department survives, including those with no employees. INNER JOIN and the equivalent comma-style join with a WHERE condition both drop departments without any employees, since a match is required on both sides. The RIGHT JOIN query keeps every row of the right-hand table, Employees, and only the departments that match one, so it too drops any department that has no employees -- the exact opposite of what's needed.
Weeks 4–5 — DSA
Two full weeks on data structures and algorithms, because it is the subject with the most patterns to recognise and the one where interviewers go deepest. Work by pattern, not by data structure: two pointers and sliding windows on arrays and strings, hash maps as the answer to 'find the pair', stacks for matching and nearest-greater problems, recursion with a stated base case, then trees (traversals, the BST property) and graphs (BFS for shortest path, DFS for connectivity). Sorting and binary search underneath all of it.
Every problem: write the code, state the time and space complexity out loud, then ask whether it can be done better. That third step is the interview.
- Ten problems a day is enough if each one gets the three-step treatment.
- Keep a one-page list of patterns with one example each; read it before every session.
- If you have a paid plan, a DSA retake at the end of week 5 tells you whether the pattern list is working.
Which of the following operations on an unsorted array of n integers takes O(n) time in the worst case?
- 1Finding the maximum elementcorrect
- 2Appending an element at the end when spare capacity already exists
- 3Reading the element at index k
- 4Reading the array's length
In an unsorted array the maximum could be anywhere, so every element must be examined: O(n). Indexed reads are O(1) because the address is computed from the base and the index; appending into existing spare capacity just writes one slot, O(1); and the length is stored, so reading it is O(1). Only a sorted array would let the maximum be read directly.
Week 6 — OOP and DBMS
OOP and DBMS are explanation subjects: the interviewer asks for a concept, then an example, then the difference from its neighbour. Prepare them as pairs. OOP: inheritance versus composition, overloading versus overriding, interface versus abstract class, encapsulation and the access modifiers that implement it, static versus instance. DBMS: keys, normalization through functional dependencies, transactions and ACID with isolation levels, indexing and when it hurts, then the ER model and SQL versus NoSQL.
For each pair, the practice is a two-minute spoken answer with a two-class or two-table example you could write on paper. Record yourself once; the pauses tell you what you don't know.
- Three days OOP, three days DBMS, one day of mixed practice problems from both.
- Joins and views belong to both SQL and DBMS; they are answered on the SQL pages.
- End of week 6: you should be able to define, exemplify, and name one mistake for every concept on the OOP and DBMS hubs.
What is 'inheritance' in object-oriented programming?
- 1A mechanism where multiple methods share the same name but different parameter lists.
- 2A mechanism where a new class acquires the properties and behavior of an existing class.correct
- 3A mechanism where a class is prevented from being instantiated directly.
- 4A mechanism where an object's internal data is hidden from other classes.
Inheritance lets a derived (child) class reuse and extend fields/methods of a base (parent) class, promoting code reuse and establishing an 'is-a' relationship. Several methods sharing a name with different parameter lists is overloading; hiding an object's internal data from other classes is encapsulation; and preventing a class from being instantiated directly describes an abstract class.
Week 7 — Retake and re-plan
Sit the diagnostic again in the subject you measured in week 1 — on the free tier this is your second monthly diagnostic; on paid, retake every subject. The sitting rotates to topics and questions you have not seen, so the score is a fresh measurement rather than a memory test. Compare the two diagnoses side by side: which topics moved from weak to developing, which did not, what the new primary gap is.
The rest of the week goes on the topics that did not move. If one refuses to budge, look upstream — the related topics on its page are usually the real gap.
- One diagnostic early in the week; the remaining days on its new primary gap.
- Read the readiness map across all subjects; a stable topic can go back to maintenance.
- Rewrite the top of your notes with the new ranked list. Old lists are noise.
A relation is said to be in First Normal Form (1NF) when which condition holds?
- 1Every non-key attribute is fully functionally dependent on the primary key
- 2Every determinant in the relation is a candidate key
- 3Every attribute contains only atomic (indivisible) values, with no repeating groups or multi-valued attributescorrect
- 4There are no transitive dependencies between non-key attributes
1NF requires atomic values in every cell, eliminating repeating groups or lists stored in a single field. The full-dependency option describes 2NF, the no-transitive-dependency option describes 3NF, and the determinant option describes BCNF, all of which are stronger, later normal forms.
Week 8 — Mock rhythm and rest
The last week is about the test as a test: timing, order, nerves. If you have a paid plan, sit two or three timed mock tests — thirty questions across all five subjects in forty-five minutes, shaped like a first-round screening — and review every miss with its practice link. On free, build your own: fifteen practice problems from mixed subjects with a timer running, no pausing, review afterwards.
Stop new material three days before the first drive. Sleep. The interviewer's follow-up questions test whether you can think, and thinking needs rest more than it needs one more topic.
- Two or three timed sittings, each followed by a full review.
- One evening re-reading your one-page pattern list and your ranked topic list.
- No new topics in the last three days.
If you have less than eight weeks
Four weeks: keep week 1 as it is, compress weeks 2–6 into two blocks — aptitude-and-SQL, then DSA-with-OOP-and-DBMS-pairs — and retake in week 4. Two weeks: one diagnostic in the company's heaviest subject, every daily set on its primary gap, one timed mixed set before the drive. One week: three-question tries in every subject on day one, then practice only on the two topics you missed most. The method does not change with the time available; only the number of loops does.
What this does and does not cover
- This plan covers the five subjects December Code assesses. It does not schedule verbal ability, English, résumé work, live-coding IDE rounds or HR interviews; give those their own time.
- The hours are a starting point, not a prescription. Ten to twelve a week with a diagnosis behind them beats twenty without one.
- Nothing here guarantees an offer. The plan makes you measurably readier in five subjects; the interview is still yours to pass.
Measure it
Start with a measurement, not a chapter.
10 questions in one subject, about fifteen minutes, a readiness figure with the arithmetic shown and the topics you missed named. Free: 1 diagnostic a month and 15 problems a day. No card.