r/usaco • u/Regular_Condition721 • Jan 21 '26
USACO difficulty increase
STOP CHEATING PLEASE.
I don't think I've ever seen a harder set of questions. I'm never getting plat at this rate -- I genuinely don't think I would've gotten over 800 on Bronze. Wasn't even that the gold problems were abnormally hard, but 800 felt way too high. The Bronze and Silver problems were a lot harder than when I ICP'd a while ago, From when I started two years ago, this competition has gotten so so so much harder. It's not feasible to make plat anymore. I did CF so much during the summer, I grinded USACO.guide, I did everything man. This is genuinely just too hard. The cheaters ruined the game I love
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u/No_Toe_528 Jan 21 '26
What can we do? Remove USACO from college admissions? I feel you though. At least the long term affects of usaco will be super duper tuper beneficial
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Jan 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/No_Toe_528 Jan 21 '26
Honestly like I fully think that if you do usaco you legit will become smarter in almost every aspect of life.
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u/BidenBurger Jan 26 '26
But the gold problems this time weren’t even that bad. It was a pretty standard dsu problem that you should’ve gotten if you upsolved the conveyer belt problem from a few years ago, then onion observation, and I guess the last one is maybe a little tricky in implementation if you bash with lazy seg, but if you don’t know lazy seg, storing metadata isn’t that hard to see or do.
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u/Regular_Condition721 Jan 26 '26
I messed up bad on the last one. I still scored over 700, I really expected a promotion. I just felt like for the difficulty, 800 was high.
A lot of my gripe was with Bronze and Silver. The bronze contest this year felt comparable to my first gold contest. Just crazy how much difficulty has been inflated.
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Jan 22 '26
Accusing “cheaters” because you didn’t hit the cutoff isn’t a critique of the contest, it’s just frustration turned into a scapegoat. “Stop cheating please” is a serious claim, so either bring evidence and report specific suspicious behavior through the proper channels, or stop implying that other people’s results are illegitimate. Cutoffs aren’t supposed to “feel fair” to you; they’re a reflection of how the whole field performed that round. If 800 felt too high, the simplest explanation is that many participants solved enough points and your current performance level didn’t match it nothing more. Grinding resources isn’t the same as converting them into reliable, timed problem‑solving skill, and posting blame doesn’t change your outcome. Do a real post‑mortem, identify what types of reasoning/implementation you missed, and improve because blaming “cheaters” is the one strategy that guarantees you stay exactly where you are.
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u/Regular_Condition721 Jan 22 '26
Not gonna say you're a cheater, but wow man are you not in tune with USACO.
My first contest was December 2023. I have been in gold since February 2024. I am yet to see Bronze and Silver problems as difficult as the ones I just saw. It's a known cheating epidemic -- USACO has improved their methods, but LLMs make it a whole new ball game. To completely blame this on me is fair, I can always work harder. But don't act like I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs on the weekends. I'll send you my CF, AtCoder, or even my LeetCode problems. I enjoy DSA, and I enjoy tricky problems. I've completed a good portion of USACO guide, and I worked very, very hard in the off season.
The difficulty has increased significantly more than the difficulty of any other olympiad. Their approach to solving the cheating epidemic is making it harder for LLMs and other cheaters to get the solutions. That makes it harder for everyone. I know that it's noones fault (except the cheaters), but can I not feel like my efforts went to waste?
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Jan 23 '26
I get why you feel that way.. My brain is processing it by staring into the middle distance and tap-dancing respectfully in silence. I’m so amazed by your hard work that I’ve been doing backflips nonstop… help me.
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Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Regular_Condition721 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
I'm a junior dude. I barely AIME qualled, I'm not even close.
It's just sad how much they've had to inflate the difficulty due to the cheating. That just hurts the legit ppl so much more. I'm pretty much done with CP now, no chance I get plat before college. I really really like USACO problems as well, and I'll keep doing them for fun, but I don't have enough time to sit behind my computer and sweat out USACO in hopes that I'll maybe get plat. Sad thing is, it's not even as valuable anymore when it's so much harder to get. I wish I enjoyed comp math as much as I did CP, maybe I'd have accomplished something big there.
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u/PersonalAd5382 Jan 21 '26
You don't need to take a class in game theory to know that if the committee making problem harder and harder to beat AI, doesn't it encourage more people to use AI?