Academic Competitions

Academic competitions do something a transcript cannot: they place a student against a national or international field on a single, common test. For universities reading thousands of applications, that is a data point they can interpret immediately.

What Students Sit

Waterloo and CEMC — the Canadian mathematics and computing contests: Cayley, Pascal, Fermat, Euclid, the Canadian Computing Competition, and the Chem 13 News and Avogadro chemistry exams. These are the contests Canadian universities know best.

US contests — AMC and the olympiad path that follows from it, along with other American competitions.

Why It Is Worth the Time

A strong contest result is externally verified and hard to argue with. It also tends to surface students whose ability is not fully reflected in coursework — a student who finds routine assignments unengaging often behaves very differently in front of a hard problem.

That said, contests are not a substitute for the transcript. They add to a strong record; they do not repair a weak one.

How Preparation Works

Preparation runs alongside regular courses rather than replacing them, and is aimed at the kind of problem the contests actually ask — which is not the kind that appears on a unit test. Students choose which contests to enter based on their interests and their university timeline.

Getting Started

Students interested in entering should speak with their mathematics or science teacher, or with the university counselling team, well before registration deadlines. Registration for most contests closes weeks before the contest date.

Results

Recent placings are published on the results page.