[dmansen]

"Doing fairly well" to me is: you asked the right questions and converged on the solution, even if it took some time. Doing poorly means: you made stuff up instead of asking questions, you invented a convoluted way of solving the problem when some other data structure would have basically solved it for you, etc. It's also painful when the candidate's mental model of computation is miles away from reality.

Obviously, getting it right the first time would be great. But I'll settle for something not obviously insane.