USACO 2026 Second Contest -- Final Results
The second contest of the USACO 2026 season featured algorithmic programming problems covering a wide range of techniques and levels of difficulty.
A total of 9854 distinct users logged into the contest during its 4-day span. A total of 7031 participants submitted at least one solution, hailing from 100+ different countries. 3203 participants were from the USA, with high levels of participation also from China, Canada, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and India.
In total, there were 19463 graded submissions, broken down by language as follows:
12569 C++17 2981 Python-3.6.9 1983 Java 1816 C++11 100 C 14 Python-2.7.17
As a note, we are working on adding support for PyPy to help improve the ability for Python competitors to earn higher scores on more computationally-demanding problems.
Below are the detailed results for each of the platinum, gold, silver, and bronze contests. You will also find solutions and test data for each problem, and by clicking on any problem you can practice re-submitting solutions in "analysis mode". If you are logged in, you will also see your own specific results below alongside the contest(s) you took.
USACO 2026 Second Contest, Platinum
The platinum division had 180 total participants, of whom 141 were pre-college students. As with the first contest of the season, the platinum problems proved quite challenging, with fewer than ten USA participants scoring over 500.
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USACO 2026 Second Contest, Gold
The gold division had 1366 total participants, of whom 962 were pre-college students. All contestants who scored 650 or higher were promoted to the platinum division.
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USACO 2026 Second Contest, Silver
The silver division had 2721 total participants, of whom 1964 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 700 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the gold division.
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USACO 2026 Second Contest, Bronze
The bronze division had 5137 total participants, of whom 3876 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 700 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the silver division.
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Final Remarks
The 2025-26 season is now well underway, with only one more contest to go before invitations are announced for the proctored US Open contest. Overall, this second contest of our season was quite successful, with one technical issue -- a load spike towards the end of the "certified" gold / platinum window that caused unwanted slowdowns for a subset of users (we are investigating the causes of this and taking steps to mitigate similar situations in the future). After starting the vast majority of top competitors in the gold division at the beginning of season, it is good to see a substantial number succeeding at promoting back to platinum. Large numbers of promotions are also being seen in the bronze and silver divisions; congrats to all who have advanced so far this season!
For those not yet promoted, remember that the more practice you get, the better your algorithmic coding skills will become -- please keep at it! USACO contests are designed to challenge even the very best students, and it can take a good deal of hard work to excel at them. To help you fix any bugs in your code, you can now re-submit your solutions and get feedback from the judging server using "analysis mode".
A large number of people contribute towards the quality and success of USACO contests. Those who helped with this contest include Nick Wu, Alex Liang, Chongtian Ma, Jichao Qian, Avnith Vijayram, Rain Jiang, Aakash Gokhale, Claire Zhang, Rohin Garg, Weiming Zhou, Daniel Zhu, Yash Belani, Botao Yuan, Sujay Konda, Larry Xing, Bing-Dong Liu, Benjamin Chen, Brian Xue, and Benjamin Qi. Thanks also to our translators for their help in extending the reach of our contests. Finally, we are exceedingly grateful to our sponsor this season, Citadel, for all they have contributed towards making our program possible!
Happy coding!
- Brian Dean ([email protected])
Professor and Director, School of Computing, Clemson University
Director, USACO