Cognizant Technology Solutions came to our campus this year. There were hiring for two job designations- Base+(Base) and Base++(Pathfinder). ECE, EE, PIE, ME branches were eligible to apply for the former profile and CS/IT for the latter. In Tier-I colleges, the company conducts only two rounds. I’m from IT, so I applied for Base++ profile. Total of 100 students appeared for the test.
Round 1: Online Test
First round was conducted on AMCAT platform. There were four sections.
- Cognitive Language assessment There were questions from English Comprehension. Some questions were asked to assess English proficiency. This section had 22 questions in all which were to be answered within 22 minutes. Most questions were easy.
- Critical Reasoning This section had 15 questions to be answered within 15 minutes. Questions were easy.
- Automata Programming There were 2 coding questions. I can’t remember the actual problem statement for the first question but it required calculation of number of connected components in a graph. It was easily solvable using BFS/DFS. The question was similar to this. The second question was to check whether the given graph was tree. Each candidate had different set of questions to solve. One of my friend had a question to find least cost path in Binary Search Tree from root to leaf(link). Some other candidates were asked to reverse a linked list(link).
- Data Interpretation This section had 15 questions expected to be solved within 15 minutes. Questions were of moderate difficulty.
The key was to solve both coding questions quickly. Total 14 (7 candidates for each job profile) made it to the next round.
Round 2: Technical Interview
This round was conducted on skype. Interviewer started with normal tell me about yourself question and went on to discuss projects mentioned in Resume. I had used Machine Learning in one of my projects, so general theoretical questions from ML and neural networks were asked. Just one coding problem was asked which was to check whether the given linked list was palindrome(
).