COMC 2022 - Eligibility

Official participation in the COMC can lead to prize money, invitations to higher-level competitions with greater national or international prestige, and recognition by universities during admissions and scholarship considerations. Therefore, the Canadian Mathematical Society has strengthened the requirements for organizations to receive and administer the COMC exams in an approved location.

When you log into your Teacher Portal, your main menu shows your Location Status and your COMC 2022 Exam Status.

For the vast majority of participating schools, you are already approved as an Official Competition Writing Centre (OCWC). That means you’d receive the exams, supervise the students and enforce the rules, then return the exams to our university marking partners just as you likely did in previous years.

Criteria for becoming an Official Competition Writing Centre:

• Official Competition Writing Centre location must not be a personal residence
• Proctors at an OCWC must be teachers/university professors accredited by a government Ministry of Education
• The Proctor(s) may not be family-related to any of the competitors they proctor

New/Unassessed

All new organizations that have registered with us as well as existing organization (periodically) are assessed by CMS staff for suitability as OCWC locations. When you first register, you may see this status. For most conventional schools, it usually take a couple of days to assess your status.

Unofficial Only

However, if your school doesn’t meet our needs to be designated as an Official Competition Writing Centre, your account will show that your location status is “Unofficial-only.” If that’s your school’s situation, you have three options:

1. (Default) Your students could continue to participate as unofficial participants. This means that you’d still receive the exams in the morning on the date of the exam (via email as PDF files to print), and would supervise the exam for your students at your own location, and return the exams to us for marking. We’d release the results to you at the same time as all other schools. However, your students’ exams will be considered unofficial so they do not qualify for merit-based prizes or official recognition based on their results.
2. You could find a nearby OCWC (usually another conventional school in your city) that would be willing to host your students for the writing of the competition. If your students write the competition at an OCWC and are proctored by a teacher affiliated with an OCWC, they would then be considered “official” participants and would qualify for merit-based prizes and official recognition. You would still order the exams and would be the only one receiving the detailed results for all your students, but the exams would be sent to the OCWC school and supervised by the people there. We’ll also email you a “teacher copy” on the Monday following the exam in case you want to work through it yourself or with your students the following week.
3. If you have already paid for some exams and do not want to participate after all (unofficially, or at a nearby OCWC), then you can request a refund before the deadline.

If you are a teacher or proctor whose school has been deemed unofficial-only, and you believe your school should be an Official Competition Writing Centre and have documentation that could reverse the status of your account (such as proof of Provincial education certification), please reach out to us at competitions@cms.math.ca

Temporarily Official

Schools who have been accepted as temporarily official for 2022: Organizations must have an unaffiliated provincially licensed teacher to proctor the exam. They must send us their education license, and be available to receive the exams and return the exams to the courier on the day after the exam takes place.