This page is a practical overview for people who want to start organising the European Mathematical Cup at their location. It summarises the most important rules and the typical yearly cycle of responsibilities.
It is not a substitute for the full official documents, so please also check out:
Key rules that must be followed
- Being a local organiser is free. We at EMC are all volunteers who care deeply about olympiad math, education and providing opportunities. Therefore, there is no fee nor financial gain to be a local organiser.
- Participation for students should be free. As mentioned above, we care about providing opportunities to all students, and we hope to get the same enthusiasm in return. Charging students any fee for taking part is strictly prohibited. Doing so will result in loss of local-organiser status for future editions.
- The competition must be held in person. In the age of AI and fast communication with the rest of the world, we want to keep the contest in person to hopefully avoid cheating and leaking the problems. Online or remote participation is not permitted.
- Contest problems and solutions remain confidential until the competition has concluded worldwide. In particular, you must ensure:
– Contestants don’t get access to the problems from you before the competition.
– Contestants won’t share problems before they get posted to our website. - Local marking must be done by humans using official materials. In particular, it should be done using our marking scheme in our marking spreadsheet. Sloppy reviews or purely AI-based marking will not be accepted.
- All parts of solutions that receive marks must be translated into English in Latin script. Missing or inadequate translations may lead to the corresponding scores being set to 0 and can affect your eligibility to organise in future years.
- You (and anyone helping you) must be legally eligible and otherwise suitable to work with minors. Applicants must not be subject to any legal restrictions or circumstances that would disqualify them from working with children. Furthermore, you are responsible for having a valid legal basis under applicable data-protection law for collecting and processing participants’ personal data and for transferring the necessary data to EMC (MNM). You must also provide participants with the relevant privacy information. Please check the Personal Data Protection Notice for more information.
These points are non-negotiable. Full details and consequences are set out in the Rules for local organisers and usually include disqualification.
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Overview of responsibilities across the year
The competition takes place each December within a nine-day interval fixed by the Organisational Jury. The exact local date and time are chosen by you (if there are multiple local organisers within the same country, we might ask you to find a common date).
The general year looks roughly like this:
- Application and preparation (usually October – late November)
- Running local participants’ applications (usually November – early December)
- Running the competition (December)
- Marking scripts and sending scans to Central Jury (late December – early January)
- Temporary results, appeals and finalisation (after Central Jury work, hopefully late February – early March)
How to apply or ask questions
Send an email to emc@mnm.hr. First-time applicants should include brief background information demonstrating experience relevant to organising a mathematics contest.
In particular, feel free to share some basic information about yourself (you can also send us your CV if you have one), if and how are you related to olympiad maths, have you ever organised similar international competitions, and how many participants (at most) you can handle (with ideally estimate of how many are interested at the moment).
We look forward to working with you and thank every local organiser for making the European Mathematical Cup possible in so many places.