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I am rather curious on the average difficulty level of the beginner exercises. I would like a poll: would you rate them at 5 kyu, 10 kyu, 15 kyu, 20 kyu?
I have no qualified guess about the overall difficulty... but some of them are definitely not beginner but 7-4 kyu or so to my eyes. With people progressing rather slowly where I live beginner may have another meaning for me.
E.g. Beginner Exercise 86 is easy to recognize after earlier exposition - but I know players which may well be paired against me (EGF 2k) who definitely may not reproduce it in actual play. But here again, it may just be a lack in fundamentals.
PS. Ok. I just recognized it isn't the solution diagram, but to play the solution with the first move given is the beginner exercise... so the above is obsolete. Still, there are other problems which require spotting two tesujis/techniques one after another, I wouldn't call that beginner.
Seems like the difficulty is increasing with the numbers.
From first 20 problems, I'd guess it's about 25k.
From last 20 problems (271~290), I'd guess it's about 10k.
I went through the first 100 problems, and tried to estimate how much of a challenge they would pose to my girlfriend, who is 8k. In my opinion, none of those problems would pose a major obstacle. Some may require some effort, and I'm sure she'd miss some opportunities like these if encountered in games instead of posed as problems, but so would I probably :)
When I have more time, I'll go through the rest, but judging from these first 100, they all seem to be in the DDK range of problems.
From the responses, I guess the first half of the problems are probably 10-15 kyu, the second half of the problems are probably 5-10 kyu. Thanks!
In my opinion all problems above 10 kyu should be kyu exercises or so. It is not that I want to make my weak skills to be decisive here... but I believe when I don't see it at a glance, then it really doesn't qualify as beginner.
I guess the second part is harder because this is apart from the classical problems the best-known problem series at SL. I have my doubts how genuine beginners would feel when going through this. (Discouraged?)