Eligibility – COMC 2026
Student Eligibility
The COMC is open to students in all locations, at all grade levels.
To be considered official participants and thereby qualify for awards, recognition or prizes, students and schools must meet the following requirements:
Students must assert that each of the following is true about themselves:
- The student must be under 19 years of age as of June 30th of this year and
- The student must be attending school full-time either virtually or in person (elementary, secondary, Cégep, or home-schooled) at least since September 15th of this year.
Additionally, any exams are only considered official if they are supervised under these conditions:
- Must be supervised, for the entirety of the competition time period, in a school or location for conditions that the CMS has approved for officially proctored exams. See School Participation Status below for more information.
- No mobile phones, calculators or other electronic devices are permitted.
- The 2½ hour writing period must begin and end sometime between 8 AM and 8PM (0800-2000) local time on the scheduled test date (Thursday for all schools in North America, South America, Central America or in time zones covering these areas; or Friday elsewhere in the world).
Official participation in the competition can lead to awards, prizes and recognition. Therefore we expect schools or organizations to provide a Qualified Proctor who receives our materials, conducts the supervision of the students and collects and sends us their work, otherwise the students will be considered unofficial. Unofficial participants will receive their scores, but are not considered for awards or prizes.
When you log into your Teacher Portal (available by start of September) and select the competition for this year, your portal shows your Participation Status for this competition. This indicates if your students will be recognized as official or not.
Here are the possible example scenarios below.
