1. General

The European Mathematical Cup (EMC) is an international mathematics competition held annually in December. The competition is open to high school students worldwide (not only in Europe), provided they participate through a local organiser.

The purpose of the EMC is to prepare high school students for other international competitions and to give them a chance to solve a few, hopefully, nice and challenging problems.

The competition takes place in December, during a 9-day interval which is chosen by the Organisational Jury. The competition can be organised on any day of the 9-day interval. The exact date varies by location and is usually chosen to be the most suitable within the given time frame.

The EMC is free and open to all high school students. Any attempt to charge the students for participation in the competition is strongly prohibited and will result in disqualification and a loss of the local organiser status for future editions.

2. Local organisers

The association Young Gifted Mathematicians “Marin Getaldić” from Croatia organises the European Mathematical Cup, in coordination with local organisers responsible for running the competition in their location.

Local organisers are individuals or organisations responsible for conducting the EMC in a particular location. Typically, local organisers are university students or mathematics professors. All local organisers must be legally eligible and otherwise suitable to work with minors. Applicants must not be subject to any legal restrictions or other circumstances that would disqualify them from working with children.

The call for local organisers will be published on the official website of the competition at least a month before the deadline for registration. If you are applying to be a local organiser for the first time, you are required to provide background information to confirm your suitability for the role of the local organiser (e.g., previous experience organising international competitions, membership in a relevant association, teaching credentials, or links to an institutional website).

If selected for the role, you must fill out the received follow-up form before the deadline. If you miss the deadline, you will not be able to serve as a local organiser.

Your obligations as a local organiser are the following:

• You should choose where and when the contest will be held and make the necessary arrangements; if there are multiple local organisers within the same country, we might ask you to find a common date. 
• Before the contest, you should inform all the potential contestants from your area about the competition and its regulations. Your information will also be published on the official webpage so potential contestants can reach you. We strongly encourage, within reason, to admit as many participants as possible.
• To organise the contest. We require that all local organisers hold the competition in person. You should distribute printed problem sheets to contestants (translated into their language if necessary). The use of any communication devices (e.g., phones, laptops, smartwatches) during the competition is strictly prohibited, and you should immediately disqualify any participants whom you find cheating. We expect you to ensure contestants adhere to the rules.
• For local organisers and any help they bring to ensure marking can be done in a timely manner, we will provide detailed marking schemes of all solutions known to the Central Jury. Marking schemes will be sent as soon as possible after the last day of the competition. They should mark and translate all students’ scripts according to the given marking schemes. Sloppy reviews or only AI-reviewed scripts will not be tolerated.
• If during marking, you find alternative full or partial solutions, you should send them (with proposed marking scheme) as soon as possible to the Organisational Jury, so we can send the reviewed marking schemes to all local organisers to ensure uniform grading among different local organisers.
• After marking, we expect to receive scans of locally marked scripts, along with the completed marking and translations of any sections where points were awarded. You should submit them no later than the date determined by the Organisational Jury, which will be sent to local organisers along with the marking schemes. The selected date will be at least 14 days after they receive the marking schemes.
• We ask that all parts of the students’ work which were awarded marks are translated, so the Central Jury can ensure the uniformity of the marking. The translations should be in English and Latin script; all parts of students’ work which are not translated in this fashion will not be considered.

Additionally, we invite local organisers to help us by proposing problems. We intend that all of the problems at the EMC are original (not already seen on the Internet or in some other competition), so we invite local organisers to send us problem proposals. It is allowed to propose problems which are not entirely original, but in such cases, we require the full background of such a problem, including whether it has appeared in another competition.

If you send us any problems, we expect them to not be used for anything until the end of that year’s EMC contest period. The problems not selected for the competition are kept confidential. We will keep unselected problems in the problem pool for future editions indefinitely, but if you want to use your problem in some other way, please email us so we can remove it from our pool of problems.

Additionally, we also invite local organisers to join the Central Jury, so you can participate in the selection process and central grading of the problems to ensure the whole process runs smoothly and fast.

3. Participants

Contestants are eligible to participate in the EMC if they are eligible for the following IMO.

The EMC is divided into two categories: Junior and Senior.

• A student can participate in the Junior category if they are less than 17 years old on the day of writing the contest, and if they haven’t yet participated in the IMO.
• Any student who is eligible to participate in the EMC can participate in the Senior Category.
• Different criteria for student participation in the Junior category may be proposed by you, but they are subject to approval by the Organisational Jury no later than December 1st.

Furthermore, local organisers are responsible for ensuring that they have a valid legal basis under applicable data protection laws for collecting and processing participants’ personal data and for transferring such data to the EMC organisers for the purposes of administering the competition and publishing the results. Where required, they must also provide participants with the relevant privacy information and obtain any necessary consent or authorisation.

4. Contest regulations

The contest regulations closely follow those of the IMO.

Contestants may receive the problems in one or two languages, as determined by you. In case you want to translate the problems into your native language, we are not responsible for any misinterpretations.

Each contestant must work independently and submit their solutions either in their native language and/or in English, as specified by you. If you allow them to write in their native language, you should translate the scripts into English and Latin script during marking.

The duration of the competition for both categories is 4 hours. The contest consists of 4 problems. Each problem is worth 10 points. We ask contestants to write only on one side of a plain A4 sheet of paper to make scans more readable. It is not allowed to write attempts at different problems on the same sheet. Each paper should contain the student’s name, location, category and the number of the problem. If the contestant uses more than one page per problem, the pages should be enumerated.

Only writing and drawing instruments, such as rulers and compasses, are permitted during the contest. Specifically, the use of books (with the exception of dictionaries for those writing in English), papers containing formulas, cheat sheets, tables, calculators, protractors, computers, internet, AI, or any communication devices is strictly prohibited.

Local organisers must ensure that no contestant has access to any direct or indirect information about the proposed problems before or during the competition. All contest problems and solutions must remain strictly confidential until the competition has concluded worldwide. Local organisers must explicitly inform all participants, verbally before the start of the competition, that sharing, communicating, or otherwise disclosing any contest problems or solutions to anyone is strictly prohibited until the competition has concluded worldwide.

5. Marking and coordination

You should mark each problem with an integer score between 0 and 10 points according to the official marking scheme. Local grading should be submitted to the Central Jury using the official marking template given with the marking schemes.

Local grading will be reviewed by the Central Jury to ensure consistency and uniformity. Should the Central Jury identify minor discrepancies in the reviewed sample, the local scores will be adjusted accordingly.

In cases where significant discrepancies are identified between local grading and the Central Jury’s evaluation, the local organiser responsible for those participants will lose the right to host the competition for at least one edition.

If the Central Jury determines that any part of the requested materials (e.g., translated scans or local marking scores) is missing after the deadline, the corresponding scores will be automatically set to 0, which may be overturned during the appeal period. 

If a significant portion of the required materials is missing, the local organiser will lose the right to host the competition for at least one edition, and all missing components will receive 0 points.

Scripts marked with 0 points due to missing translations or incomplete marking in the official spreadsheet will remain at 0 points for the temporary results. If the issue is easily resolvable (e.g., a local organiser omitted to upload a few scripts or a single problem), an appeal can be submitted even before receiving temporary results once they have fixed the issue.

6. Temporary results and appeals

As soon as possible after the contest, once the Central Jury has ensured the marking is consistent with the rest of the results, local organisers will receive temporary results, which they should forward to participants.

Upon announcement of these results, a contestant may submit an appeal through their local organiser. If the local organiser agrees with the contestant’s objection, they may forward the appeal to the Central Jury no later than the deadline provided along with the preliminary results, which will be at least 7 days after receiving temporary results. The Central Jury will then reassess the contestant’s solution and may contact the local organiser or contestant for further clarification if needed.

Once the appeal review process is concluded, the preliminary results become final. These results will be published on the official EMC website and sent to local organisers as soon as all appeals have been reviewed.

7. Prizes, medals and certificates

Some contestants are awarded prizes and medals based on the following criteria. We say a contestant is a candidate if there are no more than 5 students from the same country and category with more points. Then, for each category separately, we form a list with 6 of the best candidates from each country (we will call this a cut-list). We then set the prize cut-offs so that approximately half of the candidates from the cut-list win a prize, and the numbers of first, second and third prizes are approximately in the ratio 1:2:3. The top-performing participants are awarded medals and other prizes.

Contestants who do not qualify as candidates but rank among the top 20 in their country will appear on the Official Results list and receive any prize they are eligible for. At the discretion of the Organisational Jury, partial results may be published, excluding participants who scored below a certain threshold.

Every contestant will get a certificate of participation or any awards they have earned. The certificates will be sent to local organisers as soon as possible after the final results are published. Local organisers are responsible for forwarding the certificates to their respective participants.

A country’s score is defined, for each category separately, as the sum of scores of candidates from the cut-list. This score is used to form country results and to award the title of “European Champion”.

8. Final Provisions

By participating in the EMC, local organisers confirm that they have read and understood the competition rules and agree to comply with them.

In situations not explicitly covered by these rules, the EMC Organising Jury will make the final decision. For questions or concerns before, during or after the competition, local organisers may email the Organisational Jury.

We wish you the best of luck and an enjoyable time organising the EMC!