Compete

Preparation guide

How to prepare for CEMC Contests

Canada's national contest ladder, from grade 7 puzzles to the Canadian Computing Olympiad.

Some preparation needed · A ladder of contests by grade. Gauss for grades 7 and 8; Pascal for grade 9; Cayley for grade 10; Fermat for grade 11; Euclid for senior secondary, designed for grade 12; CIMC for grades 9 and 10; CSMC for grades 11 and 12 and CÉGEP students; Fryer, Galois and Hypatia as full-solution contests for grades 9, 10 and 11 respectively.

Competition details and how to enter Official website

Where the points actually are

The CEMC publishes every past paper since the 1990s with complete official solutions, plus free online courseware. No other contest family gives you this much free material, so preparation is entirely a matter of working through the archive systematically.

Topic breakdown

01Multiple-choice contests
Gauss, Pascal, Cayley and Fermat cover school curriculum content stretched into contest problems. Speed and accuracy matter more than advanced material.
02Euclid
Ten full-solution problems in 150 minutes. Written work is marked, so presentation and complete reasoning earn marks that a bare answer does not.
03Canadian Computing Competition
Junior division tests implementation and basic algorithms; Senior division tests graphs, dynamic programming and data structures.

A study plan that works backwards from the date

  1. Three months out Work through the CEMC Courseware for your grade level. It is free, structured, and written by the people who set the contests.
  2. Two months out One past paper per week from the official archive, timed, then read the official solutions in full even for problems you got right.
  3. Final month For Euclid specifically, practise writing up full solutions and have a teacher mark them against the official rubric.

Tips that come from the format itself

  • The CEMC official solutions are unusually good. Reading them is a genuine learning activity, not just answer checking.
  • For Euclid, partial credit is generous. Write down what you know even on problems you cannot finish.
  • If you are considering the University of Waterloo, Euclid is worth taking seriously: it feeds directly into admissions and scholarship decisions.

Practice resources

  • CEMC past contests archive Past problems · free

    Every past paper with full official solutions, free, going back decades.

  • CEMC Courseware Course · free

    Free structured online courses in mathematics and computer science, written by the contest organisers.

  • CEMC At Home problem sets Practice · free

    Free graded problem sets with solutions.

Past papers and official materials

Videos worth your time

Skills this builds

  • Algebra
  • Geometry
  • Number theory
  • Full-solution writing for Euclid
  • Programming in C++, Python or Java for the CCC

Read what other students said about preparing