The MIT Programming Contest (2025-26)

How to participate

Contestants must be at least half-time undergraduates. Some first/second year graduate students are also eligible. Students in coop programs such as 6A can participate as well. For more details, see the "eligibility tree".

If you have any questions or concerns, e-mail us at .

Note: A registration link was sent out on September 21. If you wish to participate but did not receive the email, you must let us know.

Schedule

• MIT Team Contest 1: October 11, Saturday 1:30pm EDT.
• MIT Team Contest 2: October 26, Sunday 1:30pm EDT.
• ICPC Northeast North America Regional Contest 2025: November 9, Sunday.

About

If you like programming and solving problems, we invite you to participate in the MIT Programming Contest. If you're one of the best out there, this is your chance to shine, and join a team consisting of the top programmers at MIT. Even if you don't think you're good enough to compete in the World Programming Finals, you can see how you compare to the best at MIT, and possibly surprise yourself.

We're particularly interested in people who have either of:

• experience in contests such as the IOI, USACO, IMO, or USAMO
• taken classes like 6.001, 6.046, ...

The top performers of the MIT Programming Contest will not only earn glory within MIT, they will also be invited to participate in the 2025 ICPC Programming Contest. We will use the results of the team contest to choose several top teams to represent MIT in the ICPC programming contest.

Contests

• The contest lasts 5 hours. Each team must bring their own laptop (one per team).
• Teams may bring any peripheral devices, such as keyboards.
• You are allowed to bring materials of up to 25 A4/letter size pages printed in standard font size. Besides these materials, you can also consult language reference manuals that are publicly available online. If you have not prepared such materials before, KACTL should be a good existing template you can adapt from.
• All other online materials (except the contest site) or materials existing in your laptop before the contest are not allowed.
• AI-based tools such as Copilot are not allowed.
• For printing, please use print.mit.edu to use the printer on the first floor of Stata.

We will rank teams by the total number of problems solved across the two contests, breaking ties with the total penalty time. The top three teams will advance to the Northeast North America Regional Contest (NENA).

The top teams at the NENA (at most one per university) will advance to the next round of competition, the North America Championship (NAC).

The top teams at the NAC will represent MIT in the prestigious ICPC World Finals.

All travel expenses for team members will be covered by MIT and the ICPC.

The organizers at MIT

This year the MIT Programming Contest is organized by professor Martin Rinard and student Jaehyun Koo. All organization and coaching work is done on a volunteer basis in a limited amount of time. We will do our best to run the contest as smoothly as possible, but be prepared for some glitches.

Contest Tips

• Practice! There are hundreds of practice problems available at the Baekjoon Online Judge, QOJ.ac, oj.uz, AtCoder and Codeforces. You can do problems and submit them for automatic grading. cp-algorithms.com and USACO Guide are great tutorial resources for basic to advanced book-algorithms appearing in contests.
• Since all problems regardless of difficulty have the same weight and the time recorded for each problem that you solve starts counting from the beginning of the contest, it is advisable to solve easier problems before harder problems.