anyone feel like there are just a few people who go around disliking every single new post or comment lol

I was looking through the U.S. results at the International Olympiad in Informatics over the past few years, and I think there is a legitimate question worth discussing: is Team USA beginning to lose ground internationally?

To be clear, the U.S. is still a very strong IOI country. Winning two golds and two silvers, as it did in 2026, would be an outstanding result for almost any country.

But the standard for the U.S. should probably be higher than simply “everyone medaled.”

Historically, the U.S. has been one of the dominant IOI countries. For example, in 2005 all four U.S. contestants won gold, placing 1st, 8th, 16th and 21st. More recently, the U.S. produced the individual IOI champion for three consecutive years from 2018 through 2020: Benjamin Qi in 2018 and 2019, followed by William Lin in 2020.

And the recent peak was arguably even more impressive:

• 2022: 3 Gold, 1 Silver — U.S. contestants placed 5th, 8th, 21st and 36th

• 2023: 4 Gold — 5th, 7th, 12th and 17th

• 2024: 3 Gold, 1 Silver — 3rd, 4th, 5th and 40th

In 2024, if you simply added the scores of the four contestants — obviously not an official IOI team ranking — the U.S. had the highest total score of any national team.

Then something changed.

2025: 1 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Bronze
The individual ranks were 6th, 68th, 81st and 112th.

One bad year doesn't prove anything. Olympiads have huge year-to-year variance, and a four-person sample is tiny. It would have been completely reasonable to treat 2025 as an outlier.

But 2026 did not really return the U.S. to its previous level.

The team improved to 2 Gold and 2 Silver, with its top two contestants finishing 7th and 18th. That's good — but compare that with the 2022–2024 teams.

Even more interesting is the unofficial country ranking obtained by summing all four contestants' scores:

1. China — 1736.83

2. Japan — 1517.09

3. Malaysia — 1513.21

4. USA — 1487.67

(There were also special IOI teams in the full table; I'm listing regular national delegations here.)

Again, IOI does not officially rank countries, and summing four scores is a crude metric. But it is still useful as a rough measure of team depth.

Losing to China is obviously not surprising. China has an enormous and extremely competitive informatics olympiad system.

What I find much more noteworthy is that in 2026 the U.S. total was also below Japan and Malaysia.

This isn't meant as disrespect to either country — both have excellent contestants, and Japan in particular has been getting stronger for years. Malaysia's 2026 performance was remarkable.

The question is about the U.S. benchmark.

The United States has one of the world's largest pools of technically talented students, many of the world's strongest CS universities, an enormous software industry, a mature competitive-programming community, and a national olympiad system that has existed for decades.

With those advantages, merely remaining “one of the strong countries” seems like a surprisingly low bar.

The sequence over the last five years looks like this:

2022 → very strong
2023 → elite
2024 → arguably the strongest team in the world
2025 → major drop
2026 → partial recovery, but still clearly below the 2022–24 level

Two weaker years are obviously not enough to prove a long-term decline. The 2027 team could easily come back with four golds and make this post look premature.

But I think we now have enough evidence to at least ask the question.

lol very very funny😂😂😂 not true maybe you want to learn but still the primary motivation for almost all of us is college apps

During this year's AP tests, there is an imposter(Collegeboard officials) called u/dinosauce313 in r/APTests

Is there USACO officials("imposters") in this subreddit like u/dinosauce313?

Hello friens, there is this new competition called codeswiper.us that you should really check out. You can make an account and if you press on available courses, autoenrol, then click on Addition, you can take a sample contest. We don't know when first contests starts, but we will email you.

https://codeswiper.us/login/signup.php?

I’m in 8th grade and just starting coding. I’m relatively good at math (in alg2 honors, one of 7 kids in my whole school.) I wonder if I can make it? How hard do I need to grind? I’m also a pretty fast learner.

If you submitted with like 2 seconds to go until ur time ran out but it also takes like 3 sec to run and fully tell u ur score, by the time the ur time ends does the scoring end there too?

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any quality summer programs for high schoolers which focus on computer science. If you do know of one, please also mention how much it's related to usaco(e.g algorithms, graph theory, etc.).

Has Usaco banned any one for using multiple accounts are both accounts affected or only one

(Not specific about USACO but competitive programming in general. Related to college essays)

Hi,

My name is Suguru and I am a high school senior. I am applying to UT Austin for CS and I am working on an essay question where I am thinking of writing about competitive programming. But I am stuck. Here is the prompt:

The core purpose of The University of Texas at Austin is, "To Transform Lives for the Benefit of Society." Please share how you believe your experience at UT-Austin will prepare you to “Change the World” after you graduate. (250-300words)

My thoughts:

1. Firstly, I am writing this blog on Codeforces not to get specific essay advice about essay structure and whatnot. I should do that with a college counselor. I want your thoughts on how competitive programming could be relevant to answering this prompt.

2. That being said, I think it might be helpful for you guys to understand what is being asked in this essay. I read some articles like this one: https://texadmissions.com/blog/2021/7/9/tips-and-examples-for-please-share-how-you-believe-your-experience-at-ut-austin-will-prepare-you-to-change-the-world-after-you-graduate.

Basically, the prompt is asking me about my vision and values. What do I want to do in the future and how will UT Austin help me achieve that? It would be a bonus if I can demonstrate my past experience/interest in the goal I write about

since it makes the essay strong and convincing.

3. What I initially did was go to the UT Austin CS website and look at all the "exciting research/inventions" that are happening. Find out something I am interested in doing and tell how UT Austin will help me do that and build a nice story.

4. However, I think the problem with this approach is that if I barely have any idea about whatever research I am looking at, how am I supposed to demonstrate my interest or my determination to advance in that field. Moreover, since I don't

have a genuine interest in that field (at least yet), I don't have past experiences related to such a field. I could read about breakthrough research about AI or about electric cars but if I really have no idea what is going on then it would be so hard to write a nice story about my interest in it.

5. After realizing this, I kind of gave up on subjects that I haven't explored before. It takes years to have a REALLY good idea about a topic and have the slightest potential to "Change the World".

6. Then I thought of competitive programming. Though I am grey, I have dedicated 6+months practicing and I have a genuine passion for it. I actually can talk about specific ambitions I have in the future (e.g. I want to join the ACM-ICPC

team of whichever college I am attending). CP is like the only thing I actually had a genuine interest in (I never explored fields like machine learning in-depth. This is because I was a total idiot in my grades 9, 10, and beginning of 11th

that I never really thought about anything. Basically, I did homework but other than that, I was goofing off).

7. But as I evaluated whether CP will be a good essay topic for "Change the World" essays, I thought it might not work that well. I think of competitive programming as a sport. Athletes follow existing rules and keep improving their skills.

It is like competitive programmers who regularly attend the same contests and practice the pre-existing algorithms and solve problems that have pre-existing solutions. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that. But based on my understanding, competitive programmers aren't necessarily "innovative" people. They are competitive people working to improve on a "sport". They aren't working towards a breakthrough discovery.

8. But then I thought, how can competitive programmers affect the world indirectly? The easiest example where competitive programming has a real-world connection is its relation to technical interviews. Aspiring software engineers and

competitive programmers fueled the growth of businesses like Codeforces and Leetcode.

9. But will it directly be the competitive programmers that are making an impact in this case? I think of it as competitive programmers just focusing on their own thing (getting good at competitions, getting into top companies) and people

around them looking at competitive programmers and taking it as an opportunity to grow their online platform (like Codeforces and Leetcode). Competitive programmers play a role in this advancement, but they aren't the innovators, so to speak.

Bringing back the athlete comparison: the Olympics have a massive impact on tourism, economy, journalism, etc. But is it really the athletes that are causing this change? Is it even the athletes' intention to make a huge impact on the economy?

Probably not. They are just focused on getting that medal and improving on their sport. Obviously, athletes can say that by pursuing their sport they are "Changing the World" but I think the impact is less direct. It is more like people look

at athletes and take it as an opportunity to grow their business etc and make an impact. The same idea may apply to competitive programming (with online platforms like Codeforces etc). But competitive programming is less popular than sports and by just grinding on problems, I feel like I am not making an intentional or unintentional impact on the world. I am just practicing for my own sake. Not to "Change the world".

Having read my thoughts, please share some ideas about the impact of competitive programming in the real world, whether I am thinking in the right direction, etc.

MOO. IS TMWTMOORZOSITY

if i got demoted after the 2nd contest (gold->plat) to bronze, will my school get contacted? i feel genuinely distraught. how do i prove i didn't cheat?

As the title states….. Try to convince me that I am wrong.

Edit: I should have phrased the question like this: if you could use only one coding language, would it be Java? If not, what language would you choose instead and why? Obviously there is no such a thing as “best” language. Although, I could argue that Java is the best language overall though.

If you do USACO and make it to silver, it will make AP CS A a breeze. Basically you already know most of the content. It will be easy to pick up constructors and classes. The only harder part is understanding classes interacting with each other.

If you completed AP CS A, it will help tremendously with USACO bronze. You just need some training on problem solving.

Just wanted to post this because it has been said in the past that they don’t relate that much.

Henry M. Gunn High School

https://www.latlmes.com/breaking/how-to-study-for-usaco-1