If you are prepping for the TCS NQT August cycle (registration closes 13 Aug, exam 26 Aug) or a campus drive this month, you have a dated deadline and limited time. This guide covers what a free AI mock interview actually gets you in 2026, where most free prep stops short, and how to run a full scored round in about 20 minutes without paying for anything.
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 a free mock. 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 spoken or 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, and the free tier gives you both. 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 can answer out loud or type. The interviewer speaks, and if you would rather not use a microphone you can simply write your answers; both are scored the same way. Answering out loud is the better rehearsal if you can manage it, because talking through reasoning under time pressure is a separate skill from knowing the answer, and it is the one that breaks first in a real panel.
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 you get a verdict and a written summary of how the round went — free, no card. 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 Pro unlocks, along with unlimited rounds. The verdict and summary stay free.
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 the free round now
Create a free account and the mock starts straight away — no card, and nothing to configure first. You get one full scored round on the free tier: pick your role and level, sit every section, and finish with your verdict. Start it 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 the NQT August 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.