Capital One Senior DA
Submitted my application on the 9th and got the OA the next morning on the 10th. Then my procrastination kicked in at full strength and I put it off all the way until today, emmmmm.
Overall the difficulty wasn't too high, just like people here have said. It's split into three parts, 15 questions, 70 minutes. You get your score right when you finish, and it logs how long you spent on each question. Total score is 1700 — questions 1-6 and 8-15 are worth 100 points each, and question 7 is worth 300. You can skip a question outright, or pick something at random, submit, and come back to change it later.
Questions 1-6 can all be done with Excel's filter function, using the same csv. I was a bit nervous at the start and paid too much attention to the clock, so I misread something and got the first question wrong, ugh. Honestly you can just relax on the first question and take your time reading it to get familiar with the table — after that, almost every question can be knocked out in under half a minute.
Question 7 is SQL. One level of subquery or a temp table, somewhere between easy and medium — just basic select/from/where/group/order — and the test sample was pretty reasonable. When I got to it I skipped it first based on advice from this forum, then got stuck on part 3 later, jumped back to question 7, realized it wasn't that hard, and finished it. Took me about 12 minutes personally — adjust your own strategy as you see fit.
Questions 8-15 use the same dataset, split across 4 csv files, and the difficulty is a step up from part 1. The last file wouldn't download for me — I finally got it to work by right-clicking and using "save link as." Question 9 needed VLOOKUP. I didn't understand question 10, got stuck on it for 3 minutes, and skipped it (and sure enough, got it wrong). Then I got stuck on question 11 (not really stuck, just that my first instinct was to reach for Python, and opening it up and importing the data felt like it would take too long, so I set that aside for the moment) — went back and did it in SQL instead, then it suddenly hit me that there's also pivot tables, duh. 14 and 15 were about confidence intervals in statistics. Questions 11-15 averaged 1-2 minutes each.
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