TCS Prime

Timeline 8th July – TCS NQT (Online Assessment) 13th July – TCS Prime Interview 18th July – Selection confirmation and offer letter received Online Assessment Experience Aptitude Logical Reasoning: Around 20 questions in 25 minutes. I attempted almost all of them (18–19 confidently). Quantitative Aptitude: Confidently solved around 12–13 questions, guessed the remaining. My advice is to skip lengthy questions instead of getting stuck. You only need to clear the cutoff. Advanced Quant: Attempted all 14 questions. Verbal English: Completed the entire section comfortably. Coding I got two coding questions. Q1: Find the closest index with the minimum absolute difference (Binary Search based). I almost solved it but got a TLE because I forgot a break condition. It was pretty disheartening at that moment. Q2: Sieve of Eratosthenes. Solved this in around 15 minutes, and it passed successfully. A few days later, my college informed me that I had been shortlisted for the TCS Prime interview. Interview Experience (13th July) The interview panel consisted of three members. Coding Round I was asked to write code on paper. Question: Encrypt/decrypt a string by shifting every character 7 positions ahead. I finished it in around 5 minutes, and the interviewer said the code was correct. Technical Questions Since my preferred domain was AI/ML, most questions were from there. Questions included: What is an LLM? What is RAG? A question on BMC (I honestly couldn’t recall what they meant, so I simply told them I didn’t remember instead of guessing.) Since my resume had multiple MERN projects, they also asked: MongoDB ACID properties BASE properties Being a CSE student, I was also asked: Banker’s Algorithm (answered well) Difference between KNN and K-Means (my answer was decent but could have been better) HR Questions They asked: Tell us about your family. Why do you want to join TCS? How long do you see yourself staying at TCS? How would you contribute to the company? Hobbies Initially I said exercise, and the interviewer smiled and said I should mention my actual hobby. I then said chess and listening to music. He immediately asked, “What is castling?”, and I explained it. There were a couple more AI/ML-related questions from the third panelist before the interview concluded. Overall, I felt the interview went well. Interestingly, they never asked the common question: “If you’re offered Digital or Ninja instead of Prime, will you accept?” I expected at least Digital, but thankfully ended up receiving Prime. Preparation Tips Give Mock Tests This helped me the most. My university provided 2–3 full-length TCS-style mock tests, and they were extremely useful for getting comfortable with the speed and pattern. Use ChatGPT for Aptitude Preparation This genuinely helped me a lot. I specifically asked it to teach me: Previous-year TCS NQT questions Faster solving tricks Shortcuts Alternative approaches Understanding the shortcuts matters much more than memorizing formulas. Time Management > Solving Everything Don’t spend 5–10 minutes on one difficult aptitude question. Skip it. Your goal is to clear the sectional cutoff, not score 100%. DSA Preparation I’ve solved 400+ DSA problems. I mainly followed Striver’s A2Z DSA