The Competitions:

USACO is the largest and most prominent contest the SCT competes in. Throughout the year, there will be six 3-5 hour contests which will be taken individually at home. The 7th and final contest is the US Open, which is a proctored 5 hour contest given at school. At the end of the year, 15 students from the USA are choosen to go to USACO Training Camp, of which four are then are selected to compete in the Internationial Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Getting to USACO Training Camp is a great achievement and is what every SCT member should strive for individually.

ACM has two contests, one at the University of Maryland (UMD) and one at Virginia Tech. The top 4 students based on USACO ranking go to UMD and the next 3 go to Virginia Tech. The contests are taken as a team and Java is the only programming language allowed.

IPSC is a 5 hour contest taken in May, in which teams of up to 3 people have to solve 8 problems using math, logic, and programming skills. This is taken in school and is a lot of fun.

The CML is a proctored competition given at the end of the year. There are 25 multiple choice questions that contestants have 40 minutes to answer. The questions are very tricky and require specific knowledge of how Java works.

TopCoder is another online competition, similar to USACO. Competitors are typically given three problems, each worth a different value of points. He/She will join a room with other people of relatively similar ratings, and have 1 hr 15 mins to complete the problems. After coding, the user may choose to continue to challenge phase, in which the user may view his/her opponent's source code and submit test cases. If the opponent's program fails to correctly input the solution, the challenger gains extra points.