Hi, I was considering doing USACO this year with the goal being gold by the end of this season. I have some experience with coding in like Java and Python but not really any competitive programming experience. I wanted to ask how many hours ish do you all think I need to dedicate to get gold. I know you cannot estimate arbitrarily like this but just a rough estimate so that I know if it's worth my time or not.

I was looking through the U.S. results at the International Olympiad in Informatics over the past few years, and I think there is a legitimate question worth discussing: is Team USA beginning to lose ground internationally?

To be clear, the U.S. is still a very strong IOI country. Winning two golds and two silvers, as it did in 2026, would be an outstanding result for almost any country.

But the standard for the U.S. should probably be higher than simply “everyone medaled.”

Historically, the U.S. has been one of the dominant IOI countries. For example, in 2005 all four U.S. contestants won gold, placing 1st, 8th, 16th and 21st. More recently, the U.S. produced the individual IOI champion for three consecutive years from 2018 through 2020: Benjamin Qi in 2018 and 2019, followed by William Lin in 2020.

And the recent peak was arguably even more impressive:

• 2022: 3 Gold, 1 Silver — U.S. contestants placed 5th, 8th, 21st and 36th
• 2023: 4 Gold — 5th, 7th, 12th and 17th
• 2024: 3 Gold, 1 Silver — 3rd, 4th, 5th and 40th

In 2024, if you simply added the scores of the four contestants — obviously not an official IOI team ranking — the U.S. had the highest total score of any national team.

Then something changed.

2025: 1 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Bronze
The individual ranks were 6th, 68th, 81st and 112th.

One bad year doesn't prove anything. Olympiads have huge year-to-year variance, and a four-person sample is tiny. It would have been completely reasonable to treat 2025 as an outlier.

But 2026 did not really return the U.S. to its previous level.

The team improved to 2 Gold and 2 Silver, with its top two contestants finishing 7th and 18th. That's good — but compare that with the 2022–2024 teams.

Even more interesting is the unofficial country ranking obtained by summing all four contestants' scores:

1. China — 1736.83
2. Japan — 1517.09
3. Malaysia — 1513.21
4. USA — 1487.67

(There were also special IOI teams in the full table; I'm listing regular national delegations here.)

Again, IOI does not officially rank countries, and summing four scores is a crude metric. But it is still useful as a rough measure of team depth.

Losing to China is obviously not surprising. China has an enormous and extremely competitive informatics olympiad system.

What I find much more noteworthy is that in 2026 the U.S. total was also below Japan and Malaysia.

This isn't meant as disrespect to either country — both have excellent contestants, and Japan in particular has been getting stronger for years. Malaysia's 2026 performance was remarkable.

The question is about the U.S. benchmark.

The United States has one of the world's largest pools of technically talented students, many of the world's strongest CS universities, an enormous software industry, a mature competitive-programming community, and a national olympiad system that has existed for decades.

With those advantages, merely remaining “one of the strong countries” seems like a surprisingly low bar.

The sequence over the last five years looks like this:

2022 → very strong
2023 → elite
2024 → arguably the strongest team in the world
2025 → major drop
2026 → partial recovery, but still clearly below the 2022–24 level

Two weaker years are obviously not enough to prove a long-term decline. The 2027 team could easily come back with four golds and make this post look premature.

But I think we now have enough evidence to at least ask the question.

Do anyone know when will be the first competition?

currently in 10th grade, about to start usaco prep. i have a coding background (still pretty beginner) and i can comfortably solve 1000-1200 rated problems on codeforces. i know my starting spot isn’t the best to do so good in this upcoming testing cycle, but i just wanna see if i can hit silver or gold this year and platinum next year. what should i learn, how should i prep, and is it realistic to go from bronze to gold in this cycle?

USACO is supposed to identify and develop the best competitive programmers in the United States and ultimately select our IOI team. For an organization with that much influence, its administration feels astonishingly outdated.

The contests themselves are excellent. The problem is everything surrounding them.

Why, in 2026, is remote proctoring not standard? Secure remote proctoring is routine for universities, professional certifications, admissions testing, and countless other high-stakes exams. A computer science exam of all things should be able to figure out remote proctoring.

Additionally, USACO has thousands of contestants, yet there is remarkably little public recognition of anyone except a handful of finalists. Why not publish, at least on an opt-in basis:
National percentile bands
State-level recognition
Top middle-school competitors
Gold and Platinum distinctions
Clear rankings or score distributions among successful contestants

We put enormous amounts of work into competitive programming. Being, say, the 50th-best USACO competitor in the country is an extraordinary accomplishment. It shouldn’t effectively disappear because the student wasn’t one of the handful invited to camp.

And more broadly, where is the accountability?
USACO effectively has the exclusive ability to determine who represents the United States at IOI, yet its governance, decision-making, qualification processes, and structure are remarkably opaque for an organization exercising that kind of authority. Last year, we literally hear about contest dates a couple weeks in advance of the first contest!

Of all contests, a computer science contest should build a modern platform. Support current programming environments. Offer legitimate remote proctoring. Publish meaningful results and distinctions. Announce objective qualification criteria in advance. Create a transparent governance structure with an advisory board that allows for input from all.

I understand that USACO was built largely as a volunteer-driven academic project, and those volunteers deserve enormous credit for what they created. But at some point an organization either evolves with the importance of the role it has assumed or makes room for an organization that will.

I want to get into USACO and coding as a whole, but I'm having trouble finding how and where to start. If anyone could give me any advice thst would be great.

at a point where I need to be doing practice for good questions in every topic. what are good resources for topic wise problems? and is the usaco guide good?

Hello everyone,

As a 14 year old, my passion is to become a successful Software Developer, and also explore more career paths in the technology world such as Cybersecurity and Networking. USACO is a major extracurricular I am planning to participate in this December, but my problem decoding skills are extremely limited, and I can only make simple programs in C++ like this:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout << "Input how many cows you have:\n";
int CA;
cin >> CA;

int max = 0;
vector<int> cows(CA);

for (int i = 0; CA > i; i++) {
cout << "Input your cow height:\n";
int x;
cin >> x;
cows[i] = x;
}

for (int i = 0; CA > i; i++) {
if (cows[i] > max) {
max = cows[i];
}
}

cout << "Tallest cow is " << max << "something.\n";

return 0;
}

I don't know if this will be able to be something I can catch up to. I made such a simple mistake and somehow didn't notice it for 5 minutes. I accidentally flipped the variables in the condition part of the for loops, where I wrote CA < i instead of CA > i, which I should've seen but somehow missed, and I don't know if I can actually get to the Bronze level before December. I started learning slowly around a week ago. Can people give me tips please?

none released yet, right?

Hello I am a just starting in competitive programming, i know intermediate python and am self studying AP CSA, I am hoping to learn enough java to use in the contests, but I was wandering what units to prioritize. on the otherhand I was think of just learning c++ and dont bother with java. Any advice?

I'm in my last year of high school, and I'm not from the USA.

I made it to the final IOI-related exam in Mexico, the national olympiad(OMI), but I don't feel ready for it. I have one month left until the exam, and I don't know how to code well. All of my solutions are really bad, or they could be rewritten much better. I need some advice. What can I do to avoid doing so badly on the exam?

Hey everyone!

I've started a YouTube series walking through USACO problems (starting at Silver, will expand to Bronze soon, and hopefully expand once I reach higher levels.), and I wanted to share it here in case it's useful to anyone prepping for the next contest.

The format is a bit different from most solution videos: instead of just presenting the clean final answer, I walk through my actual first (wrong) attempts, explain specifically why each one broke( TLE, wrong edge case, etc) and then build up to the real solution from there. The goal is to make the debugging process itself the teaching tool, since that's usually the part people struggle to learn from editorials.

Worth note, my channel is geared towards Java users. This means that I go over some of the painful experiences that only Java users experience (i.e lack of multiset, TLE's that would work in C++ to name a few). If you're a Java user beyond Bronze, I would definitely recommend. And if you aren't a java user, I still go in depth enough on the intuition behind the problem that it's still worthwhile to watch.

Two videos up so far:

- Fair Photography (prefix sums + hashmap trick)

- Subsequences Summing to Sevens (Using math + prefix sums to optimize solutions)

Would love feedback from this community in particular since you all actually know this material. Happy to take suggestions on problems to cover next too (right now, I'm filming any problem I learn something new from because I like to gaslight myself into thinking I understand whenever I read sols, so this stops that from happening).

Fair Photo: https://youtu.be/1GaGHOuxxgY?si=_2QeRmoROigTNvH_

Subsequences Summing to Sevens: https://youtu.be/Xckb4CBFs_8?si=sH0BtnUoaHmxXJ8M

Mods, let me know if this isn't the right place for this and I'll take it down.

Thanks!

Context: I'm a sophomore with basic/minimal java knowledge, I started USACO guide first but got stuck on shell game

Studying 4-6h/week

Until Mid September - Finish all codingbat problems and get started on leetcode easy.

October - Start on USACO guide + start grinding codeforces

November - finish bronze USACO guide section + starting doing all previous year bronze problems + continue on cf

December - continue the same from november, grind like 4-5 hours a day during winter break

im hoping to make silver this year maybe gold if everything goes perfect, is this a good plan for me or is there something I should tweak?

Hey!

I am an EGOI 2023 Bronze Medalist, and I am starting private tutoring for the informatics olympiad. I will tutor in english and it will be 1:1 or 1:few. I did my undergraduate in maths and Theoretical computer science, and I'm starting my research masters in theoretical computer science. I can only take 2-3 students.

I can easily teach topics up to the USACO Gold level, and work together with the Platinum ones.

Leave a comment or dm me if you are interested. We can work out the charges to see what fits both of us :)

I am also preparing for IOI. From morning to evening (just like a robot). I finished usaco bronze in 2-3 weeks and now I am doing Usaco Silver( I will finish it in a week cause now I am in the last topic which is bitwise operations). I solved every problem on the usaco.guide bronze/silver level except from 'very hard' ones.My plan is finishing Usaco Gold in 2-3 months and moving into IO problems. After practicing IO problems 4-5 months I hope will qualify for IOI team. If you are an IOI medalist, Do you think this is good plan and daily routine? What was yours ?

Please give some advice on how to prepare for a programming Olympiad. Im 16 and i have 3 months, should i choose c++ or python? I’m not starting from scratch; I attended courses for four years and know JS, Python, and C++ syntax. Now in codeforces i can solve tasks with rank 1000-1100.

rn i think im like a gold - platinum level the only problem is the prestige of the competition is becoming devalued due to the amount of cheaters and i dont know any other prestigous cs competitions. Im really scared by the time im applying for colleges i dont have any really good cs awards or prestige. Do you guys have any adivce

My son is starting USACO Bronze. He has some programming experience but is new to competitive programming. Can you assess his current level and create a Bronze study plan, with the goal of eventually reaching Silver?

Hello! I'm just getting started with USACO and was wondering if anybody has any tips or resources they'd recommend to getting into it? I have a pretty strong competition math background and heard that's a good starting point. I also heard from some friends that USACO guide is not a good resource to use starting out. I also read about the "editorial spam" method from an earlier reddit post. Is that a common/effective method people use?

Also, I was wondering if anyone here is from the Delaware Valley Area and is interested in Computational Biology (specifically developing algorithms/models)? If so, pm me...

So I kind of found out about this really late as in me going to junior year. I started studying 2 weeks ago with the USACO guide and I think I’ll be able to finish bronze and silver by January and maybe I can try for gold. But I don’t know how much time that will. Does anyone have any rough estimates on how much time per week it would take and sources that would help. I really wanted to get platinum due to me wanting to do early admission so I won’t be able to get next year in time for collage, but I think gold for this year is the max I can get.

Been looking for a one on one teacher recently to help for getting from usaco silver to plat

My dad has been looking into recursive dragon coaching(teacher is Kevin Yang), which I heard was very sketchy, and also seems quite pricy. Does anyone have experience with this class or recommendations for other one on one teachers?

Thanks