If you have a TCS NQT sitting or a campus drive coming up, you have a dated deadline and limited time. This guide covers what a scored AI mock interview actually gets you in 2026, where most free prep stops short, and how to get a taste of it in about 2 minutes for free before you commit to the full round.
Feedback is cheap. A verdict is not.
Most free interview prep gives you feedback: a list of tips, maybe a rewrite of your answer. That feels useful and changes very little, because feedback without a decision attached is easy to nod along to and forget. What actually moves you is a verdict — someone, or something, saying hire or no-hire on the answer you just gave, with a reason.
That is the difference worth looking for in any interview prep tool, free or paid. Not "here are some pointers", but "here is where this answer landed, and here is what pushed it there". A verdict is uncomfortable in a way that tips are not, and the discomfort is the point: it is much cheaper to hear it alone in your room than across a panel table.
The question most free prep skips: does your code actually run?
There is a gap in a lot of interview prep that only shows up on exam day. You can read a solution, follow the logic, feel confident — and still submit code that fails, because reading your own code is the worst possible test of your own code. Your brain runs the version you meant to write. A judge runs the version you actually wrote.
So a scored conversation is only half of it. The other half is executing your code against real test cases and seeing it pass or fail. On placd the practice problems run in an in-browser code judge that actually executes what you wrote and checks the output, including the inputs people skip when nobody is watching: empty input, a single element, all-identical values, the maximum size, zeros and negatives. Those are what quietly fail fresher submissions that looked fine on the sample case.
Worth being precise about how these two fit together, because a lot of pages are vague on it: the AI mock interview is a typed conversation that gets scored, and the code judge lives on the practice problems where your code is executed for real. They are two separate surfaces: the code judge and the 2-minute readiness check are free, and one full mock interview is free when you sign up. Use the mock to rehearse how you explain yourself, and the judge to prove the code behind the explanation actually works.
What a 20-minute scored round actually covers
A round is built around the role and experience level you pick, so a backend fresher and a data-engineering candidate do not get the same questions. It opens with an introduction round — the ordinary "tell me about yourself" that far more people fumble than admit — then moves through technical questions for your track and a behavioral section.
You type your answers. Every round is scored the same way a panel would score it — on whether your reasoning is structured and complete, not on how fast you speak. Writing under a clock is still a rehearsal of the thing that breaks first in a real panel: organising a thought while the timer runs.
Twenty minutes is roughly what a full round takes. That is short enough to do on a weeknight and long enough that you cannot bluff your way through it.
What the scorecard tells you, and what to do with it
At the end of the free 2-minute readiness check you get a scored result across your stream's question banks at no cost, enough to see where you stand today. At the end of the full mock interview you get a verdict and a written summary of how the round went. That is the part worth sitting with: it names the thing that actually decided the round, which is usually not the thing you were worried about going in.
Turn it into a study plan rather than a mood. Write one line per miss — froze on "why did you choose that", forgot to state the complexity, ran over time, explained after coding instead of before — and keep the log across a few rounds. Patterns repeat. A vague "I am bad at interviews" becomes three specific, fixable things, which is a far smaller problem than the one in your head.
If you want the full breakdown — per-competency scoring with evidence pulled from your own answers, your strengths, and exactly what to work on — that is what a mock pack or a pass unlocks.
Who this is actually for
Campus freshers with a dated drive coming up, who need a rehearsal under real conditions rather than more notes. Off-campus applicants who get fewer shots and cannot afford to spend the first one learning how the format feels. And career switchers, who usually know the material better than they can perform it, and whose real gap is narrating their reasoning to a stranger under time pressure.
If you are preparing against a specific employer, pair the round with the company question banks — placd.in/companies/tcs for the NQT track, or placd.in/companies/amazon if you are targeting product companies — so the questions you rehearse match the ones you will be asked.
How to start free right now
Create a free account and take the 2-minute readiness check straight away, free, and nothing to configure first. Pick your stream, answer six questions, and get a scored result plus every question bank in your stream. When you are ready for the full round, one full AI mock interview is free when you sign up at placd.in/products/mock-interview.
Then go break your own code on the practice problems while the feedback is still fresh, and slot the whole thing into a paced schedule with a learning roadmap at placd.in/roadmaps. If an NQT sitting is your deadline, simulate that exam specifically — same rough duration, same format, this week rather than the night before. The goal is not to be perfect on the day. It is for the real thing to be your second time performing, not your first.