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Competition Rules

Below are the rules for all of the rounds we currently offer at Caltech Math Meet. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at cmm-help@caltech.edu or on the Discord server.

The Ronald and Maxine Linde Hall of Mathematics and Physics         Source: Randall Howard

General Rules

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  1. Contestants must be 19 years old or younger and must be enrolled in high school full-time.

  2. Each team can have no more than six people. Teams with fewer than six people will be at a disadvantage.

  3. No aids other than writing instruments and paper will be allowed. Compass and ruler are allowed, but not required. Protractors are not allowed. In particular, no calculators or generative AI will be allowed on any part of the competition.

  4. CMM will use the mathematical conventions found here. Please make sure students are familiar with these conventions so that their answers are not marked wrong because they did not write their answers in simplest form.​

Team Round Rules

​The team round will last for 60 minutes. The test will have seven proof-style questions. The questions will roughly be in order of increasing difficulty. Each question will be labeled with its corresponding point value.

Individual Round Rules

This year, CMM is implementing subject-specific Individual Rounds. The subjects will be some subset of {Algebra/Number Theory, Combinatorics, Geometry, Calculus.} Most likely each student will choose 2 individual subject rounds to take, but this is still TBD. Each individual round will last for 50 minutes, and will have ten questions each with short answers. Students will not need to justify their answers to the individual round questions.

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Top-scoring students on each individual round may be invited to a tiebreaker round. They will be given a handful of questions to be solved in a short period of time. The students will be allowed to hand in their answers before the time limit. The students with tied individual scores will be ranked first by the number of correct answers on the tiebreaker and then by their time of submission.

Guts Round Rules

This year, CMM is implementing a guts round. The guts round will last for 75 minutes, and will consist of nine sets of three problems with short answers that contestants solve in their teams. Each set of three problems must be turned in before the next set is obtained. There is a live leaderboard showing the scores of all the teams in real-time.

Scoring

Each individual will receive a score on each individual round they take based on the problems they solve. If ties must be broken to determine the ranks of the top students, the tiebreaker round will be used. If there are still ties to be broken, we will determine a ranking based off of the highest-numbered question on the individual round answered correctly by one tied individual but incorrectly by another.

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The overall team score breakdown is as follows: 50% Individual Round, 30% Team Round, 20% Guts Round, where Individual Round is 6*(average of individual scores) if (# team members) ≥ 4, and (sum of individual scores) if (# team members) < 4.  If two teams are tied, the following criteria will be used, in order, until a winner can be determined:

  1. Highest team round score.

  2. The highest individual score of an individual on one of the teams but not on the other team.

  3. The highest-numbered question on the team round solved by one tied team but incorrectly by another.​

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