Guidelines

The following are guidelines to consider while competing in this year’s contest:

·        Mathematical terminology is used throughout all of the tests.  You may wish to prepare your younger students for words like “sum”, “product”, “difference”, “quotient”, "integer", "sequence", etc.

·        Figures are not necessarily drawn to scale.

·        Problems are not necessarily in order of difficulty.  Contestants are encouraged to look the entire test over during the time interval.  A competitor who focuses on early hard problems may not get to later easy problems.

·        The words “mean” and “average”, without qualifiers, shall represent the arithmetic mean.

·        In triangles, unless otherwise specified, uppercase letters represent the vertices (or angles) of a triangle, lower case letters represent the lengths of the sides opposite these vertices.  E.g. in triangle ABC, a, b, and c are the lengths of the sides opposite A, B, and C.

·        “Natural numbers” and “counting numbers” are considered to be the same set, and do not contain zero.

·        If consistent units are used throughout a problem, assume the answer should be in terms of those units as well, unless otherwise specified.  If no units are used in a problem, assume “units”, “square units”, etc., were used throughout.

Students should bring a pencil and an eraser to each competition.  All other materials will be provided. 
Any other accommodations must be approved in advance (Nov 18)