Questions, answered plainly.

Anyone who has not completed secondary school may compete officially, regardless of country or grade. Dual-enrolled secondary students remain eligible.

Yes. Registration and participation are free.

The competition is online. Participants may start from anywhere during the worldwide contest window.

The contest window runs from November 14, 2026 at 00:00 UTC through November 15, 2026 at 23:59 UTC. Your 90-minute timer starts only when you begin.

The paper begins with accessible foundations and progresses through advanced and challenging problems intended to distinguish strong combinatorial reasoning.

Topics may include counting, probability, graph theory, the pigeonhole principle, extremal arguments, games, invariants, recursion, and related combinatorial ideas.

Yes. There is no minimum grade. Students in grade 10 and below, or equivalent, are also eligible for the junior ranking.

Undergraduates and adults may take the test unofficially, but they are not eligible for official rankings or awards.

The competition is designed for pen and paper. Calculators, computer algebra systems, code, outside help, and online searching are not allowed during an official attempt.

Ties are broken by the hardest problem solved, comparing from Problem 20 downward. Any remaining tie shares the same rank.

Preliminary results are planned for November 19, 2026, with final results on November 24, 2026.

Yes. The official problems and solutions are planned for publication on November 17, 2026.

Official participants in grade 10 and below, or equivalent, are included in a separate junior ranking in addition to the overall ranking.

If the text of a problem appears publicly during the contest window, that problem is removed from scoring for every participant.

No. Medal designations recognize competition performance. Any physical gold medals would depend on confirmed sponsor support.