Unofficial archive — problems, solutions & results © IMC, reproduced with permission.

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About the IMC archive

What is the IMC?

The International Mathematics Competition for University Students (IMC) is an annual individual competition held since 1994, drawing students from universities worldwide. Contestants work over two days on a small set of proof problems, each marked out of 10 (editions in 1999–2008 used a 20-point scale; 2020–2022 had 8 problems). Studolymp archives every IMC problem, its official solution(s), and — where the organisers published per-contestant results — statistics on how the field actually performed.

How IMC statistics & difficulty are computed

  • Field cohort — statistics exclude near-zero participants: the cohort is contestants whose total ≥ 3 points on the 10-point scale (scaled to each edition’s marking scheme). This keeps difficulty about genuine contenders.
  • “Solved” / “near-0” — “solved” = scored ≥ 8 of 10 (≥ 16 of 20 in the 1999–2008 editions); near-0 = scored ≤ 1 of 10 (≤ 2 of 20). Both are shares of the field cohort.
  • Difficulty bands — by share of the cohort that solved the problem: easy ≥ 50% · medium ≥ 30% · hard ≥ 15% · very hard ≥ 5% · killer < 5%. Bands are computed live, so they update if the data does. They are relative to the IMC field and not comparable to another olympiad’s “hard”.
  • Discrimination — the corrected item–total correlation (problem score vs the contestant’s total minus that problem). See the project methodology for the general definition.
  • What’s missing — early editions (1994–1998) published prize lists only; 2013 published no individual results; some editions give totals without per-problem scores. Those years show problems without field statistics, labelled as such — never silently faked.

Disclaimer & attribution

Studolymp is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the IMC. All problems, official solutions and results are © the International Mathematics Competition and the respective problem authors, and are reproduced with permission. Statistics are computed by Studolymp from the published individual results and are unofficial. Official problems, solutions and standings live at imc-math.org.uk ↗.