- Students, especially those with backgrounds in math, are often uncomfortable with the seemingly ‘arbitrary’ dropping of constants and lower-order terms in Big-O runtime analyses. Some students will understand this better after viewing runtime graphs.
- It may be helpful for students to avoid introducing simplification of Big-O expressions until after students have intuition about it.
- When viewing math-like definitions of Big-O, students often want to treat the topics like mathematical expressions, and this can be a hard habit to break.