USACO 2026 Third Contest -- Final Results
The third contest of the USACO 2026 season featured algorithmic programming problems covering a wide range of techniques and levels of difficulty.
A total of 7302 distinct users logged into the contest during its 4-day span. A total of 5084 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, India, and Singapore.
In total, there were 14003 graded submissions, broken down by language as follows:8997 C++17 2349 Python-3.6.9 1479 Java 1052 C++11 99 C 27 Python-2.7.17
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 Third Contest, Platinum
The platinum division had 300 total participants, of whom 243 were pre-college students.
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USACO 2026 Third Contest, Gold
The gold division had 1245 total participants, of whom 910 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 750 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the platinum division.
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USACO 2026 Third Contest, Silver
The silver division had 2446 total participants, of whom 1916 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 Third Contest, Bronze
The bronze division had 3014 total participants, of whom 2374 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
I'm happy with the results from our third and final "standard" contest of the current season. Technically, everything went very smoothly (we made upgrades to our infrastructure after seeing load-related challenges in the second contest and these seem to have paid off very well). A good number of participants were promoted in all divisions, despite again a very challenging slate of problems. The USACO staff and I are still spending much more time than ideal on issues related to academic integrity (e.g., manually reviewing submissions, filing reports with school principals, etc.) but these are important and necessary to maintain the high standards of integrity we and others expect from our contests. Generative AI has made this challenge particularly acute, but we are hoping the move towards greater proctoring will mitigate this concern --- we are hoping all goes well with our final invitational proctored contest of the 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 Akshaj Arora, Chongtian Ma, Aidan Bai, Melody Yu, Aakash Gokhale, Avnith Vijayram, Suhas Nagar, Claire Zhang, Danny Mittal, Alex Pylypenko, Sujay Konda, Rain Jiang, Kai Jiang, Bing-Dong Liu, Larry Xing, Daniel Kim, Richard Qi, Botao Yuan, William Lin, Charlie Yang, 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