Contests
Our platform enables you to host programming competitions with ease. Its flexible configuration system makes it ideal for use in training sessions, practice events, or large-scale Olympiads with tens of thousands of participants.
In programming contests, participants are tasked with solving a series of programming problems, with points awarded for each successfully solved problem. The winner is typically the one who solves the most problems in the shortest amount of time. These contests serve not only as a fun and competitive way to sharpen programming skills but also as an effective tool for assessing a participant's knowledge and problem-solving abilities.
Learn more about organising contests using Eolymp:
Concepts
Visibility
Contest visibility controls which space members can view and participate in the contest. There are three visibility settings:
Public: The contest is visible on the website to all members in the space, and anyone can join and participate.
Unlisted: The contest is not listed on the website, but members with a direct link can still join and participate.
Private: The contest is hidden from the website, and members cannot join it on their own.
Members who are explicitly added to the contest will always be able to see and participate, regardless of the visibility setting.
By default, when members join a contest on their own, they participate officially. However, you can enable the "Users who join contest on their own participate unofficially" option to make these members participate unofficially. This allows you to manually add members for official participation while letting others join unofficially.
Format
Eolymp supports both IOI and ICPC contest formats, each with unique scoring systems. The IOI format awards points for partial solutions, with the final ranking based on total points, making it ideal for high school-level competitions like the International Olympiad in Informatics. In contrast, the ICPC format only rewards fully correct solutions and includes penalties for time and incorrect attempts, emphasizing speed and accuracy, commonly used in university-level contests like the International Collegiate Programming Contest.
Participation Mode
Eolymp offers two participation modes: online and virtual. In online mode, all participants compete simultaneously during a scheduled time, ideal for live events like ICPC or IOI. Virtual mode allows participants to start at any time within a set window, offering flexibility for long-running contests. Both modes can include upsolve, a feature that lets participants continue solving problems after the contest without affecting official rankings, making it useful for learning and practice.
Problems
Before adding problems to a contest, they must first be included in the space's problem archive. You can create your own problems directly on Eolymp, or import them from Basecamp or Polygon. Once the problems are in the archive, you can easily add them to your contest.
Participants
Every space member taking part in a contest has an individual participant record. This record tracks the member's progress, including their score, the time they started, and all submissions they have made throughout the contest.
Scoreboard
The scoreboard provides a ranking and a summary of participants' results. Depending on the contest format, it will either display points awarded for each problem (IOI format) or show the number of attempts and the time taken to solve problems (ICPC format). The scoreboard visibility can be customized to be accessible only to administrators, participants, or made public for everyone to see.
Announcements
During a competition, you may need to share important updates with participants, such as corrections to a problem statement or extensions to the contest duration. Eolymp lets you create announcements that are instantly displayed to participants, ensuring they receive critical information in real-time.
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