The USAMO process is extremely similar to USACO, so if you are involved in coding it might help to consider the similarities between the two contests when accessing the difficulty level of various math contests. While the USACO process goes: USACO Bronze, USACO Silver, USACO Gold, USACO Platinum, and then selection for the team, the USAMO process goes: AMC8, AMC10/12, AIME, USA(J)MO, and then selection for the team. Thus, you can equate the difficulty level of USACO Bronze to AMC8, USACO Silver to AMC10/12, etc.

First, here are some abbreviations commonly used:

• AMC10: American Mathematics Competition for 10th and under

• AMC12: American Mathematics Competition for 12th and under

• AIME: American International Mathematics Exam (top 2.5 percent from AMC10 and AMC12 qualify)

• ML: Math League

• USA(J)MO: USA (Junior) Mathematical Olympiad (~200-300 students from the nation qualify and some from other countries)

Additionally, here’s a contest rating scale from 1 through 10 (with 10 being the hardest) to help give a relative difficulty of each contest:

The average difficulty of the competitions that the team will compete in will range from 2.5-4.5 (with some being harder than others).