The second contest of the 2025-2026 USACO season will run from January 30th to February 2nd. Good luck to everyone! Please wait until the contest is over for everyone before discussing anything contest-related (including but not limited to your scores or anything about the problems).
For US high school students vying for IOI, there are some new rules regarding the format this year, please refer to the website regarding the updates.
For those unfamiliar with the USACO contest format, please refer to the contest instructions and rules. We provide a short FAQ but folks should read all the rules carefully.
I have a question about the contest. Where do I ask it?
Email the contest director via the instructions above. Do not post anything publicly about the questions (including but not limited to your scores, how you felt about the problems, any content of the problems, etc) until after the contest is over for everyone. Do not DM me or anyone else affiliated with USACO, only the contest director can assist you. The contest director does not monitor Codeforces, this blog post is merely a courtesy to inform other people of the contest.
When can I enter the contest?
For bronze and silver, the contest will open on January 30th. For gold and platinum, the contest opens at 12pm ET on Saturday, and you must start the contest between 12pm and 12:15pm ET on Saturday to get a certified score.
If I submit multiple programs, which one gets evaluated?
Only the last submission will be evaluated for official scoring purposes.
Can I use prewritten code / templates?
No.
Can I use AI tools during the contest including but not limited to ChatGPT and Copilot?
No.
Am I allowed to use outside resources during the contest?
You may only refer to language documentation.
Can I solve problems in Rust?
No, the only languages supported are C, C++, Java, and Python. Consult the instructions for language-specific technical details.
Will Rust support be added?
Probably not. Petition IOI to add Rust support first.
I don't think we would see go or even rust support in IOI or similar programming contests, because as we see in the latest versions of C++, it becomes more and more simpler than older versions and it wouldn't just make sense to add rust support, as I know people prefer rust only because it is simpler(at least in competitive programming).
Constantly mentioning Rust lol
Why I don't see anything in the announcement page?
contest begins tomorrow
Read the schedule under your account settings.
It shows up now
wow AksLolCoding. thank you for the most useless reply. anyways im excited to take gold tmrw. hopefully its harder than the first contest :)
am not able to create an account ? :(
Extend time of contest please, there is a lot of problems with usaco.org site, i see cloudfare error saying "Connection timed out".
I hope the best submissions would be evaluated instead of last ones, because i couldnt resend mine best.
If you are having issues submitting your code, please email your code to bcdean@clemson.edu
Site was lagging way too hard during certified contest.....
During the certified contest I had the worst experience of a competition ever I imagine to myself that USA under 18 accounts got priority over other people and maybe even all USA accounts over me (I am from Israel), but it was the worst. the site crashed every half a hour and it took for every submission about 40 minutes to get evaluated. which is devastating because they only take the last submission so you cannot send another one to the problem until you got your score.
for me it really sucked because I have solved some subtask and couldn't send it because the site crashed and then my timeframe ended, and this 80 or something probably will be the gap between staying in gold or going to plat
From Brian Dean:
Note: there was a load spike towards the very end of the certified gold / platinum window that affected site responsiveness. Our sincere apologies to those affected; please know these technical issues are as frustrating for the USACO staff as they are for the participants. We are still trying to diagnose the cause of the issue to make sure it does not show up in future contests (this did not happen in the prior contest, involving a higher participant count). Any program submitted for grading by the end of your window will be graded and counted, irrespective of the length of the grading queue at that point. As this issue affected everyone in the same way, we will try to be reasonably generous when setting gold promotion cutoffs. Note also that since there were 1000+ participants in the gold and platinum contests, we will unfortunately be unable to respond to individual emails about this situation.does anyone else think gold has become easier the last couple years?
i remember a few years ago when upsolving the gold contests, solving the hardest problem would usually take days (obviously spending hours sporadically). These problems would usually be 2200-2400 and approx 1/2 of them a contest.
lets look at some data.
if we look at the contests from [2020 Open, 2023 Feb] compared with [2023 Open, 2025 Open], there is a clear difference in the difficulties between contests as many include 2 problems with 2000-2100+ and one less. In the latter half, contests often have 2 problems with <= 2000 rating and 1 problem (often not much higher than 2100) 2100+ (notable exceptions include: 24 Open and 24 Jan).
Also, the first two contests from this season have been, for lack of better wording, piss easy (for a formidable Gold contest).
I bring up this topic because I want to understand why this is happening to USACO Gold as the difficulty in Gold decreases, so does the honor of achieving Plat.
What is the plan for USACO psetters (such as Benq) to fix this? I know he is more than qualified to write elegant Gold contests with early 2020s difficulty. Has this changed occurred due to AI being able to solve Gold level problems?
I know some of my claims may be fragile (and "data" as well), but I think there is a general consensus among contestants that Gold difficulty has decreased. This post is just to understand more about this change.
ragebait?????
Here's my take. The problems are actually getting a little harder or staying about the same level, but the coders are getting better. It's possible that some of the problems (or many of them) from the recent contests were easier than normal, but I think that is unlikely.
For your first point, I'm sure you've improved over the past few years, and that is why you could easily solve recent Gold problems, but it took you days/a lot of hours a few years ago.
Rating-wise, I think it's similar to Codeforces. A 1900-rated Codeforces problem 5-10 years ago is probably not the same difficulty as a 1900-rated problem now. What we perceive as difficulty has changed.
However, that means that the standard should be increased (I'm only talking about Gold). I do agree that problems must become harder as coders become better. I don't believe that problems are getting easier tho.
Firstly, Open 2025 was a major outlier, I don't think you should count that one. Additionally, USACO Rating, while helpful, isn't the most accurate source...
Contests become easier as we improve, both as individuals and collectively. I've experienced that several times. The level is constantly moving up. You can't really find out that something's getting easier for you without gaining experience in it and it'd need a pretty large collection of reference contests and comparing your performance in them to conclude that it's getting relatively easier at least.
When I was doing some USACO, IIRC it was always struggling with many people scoring very high too.
When will results be announced?
UPD: Results are out!!!
To still have the soon on the website for the result is CRAZY.
it's been a full week
yes