Gauss Contests

Contest dates:

• North and South America: Wednesday, May 14, 2025  
• Outside North and South America: Thursday, May 15, 2025

Contest timing: Contest Supervisors are expected to administer the contest as close to the beginning of the school day as possible in their respective time zones on the official contest date in their country.

Ordering deadline: Thursday, April 24, 2025 

• 25 multiple-choice questions.
• Time allowed for completion is 60 minutes.
• Score out of 150.
• Written at school, participants write individually on paper or online. 
• Some calculators permitted. 

Questions on the Gauss Contests are based on math curriculum common to all Canadian provinces. The last few questions are designed to test ingenuity and insight. Rather than testing content, most of the contest problems test logical thinking and mathematical problem-solving. 

Online Practice Contest

Participants writing the Gauss Contest online use our CEMC Contests Online platform. In order to give educators and their participants an opportunity to familiarize themselves with this system, we provide a practice contest that features questions from last year’s Gauss Contests. The practice contest system opens a few weeks before the Gauss Contest day and can be accessed until close to the official contest date. Participants do not receive a test score on attempting a practice contest.  

Below are links to four types of resources and classroom support that can help with preparation for the Gauss Contests:

• Past Contests: Participants can attempt past contests to know more about the contest format, level of difficulty and time management. The CEMC has posted contests and their solutions from previous years in the Past Contests section of Tools and Resources.  
• Problem-Set Generator: Participants, educators and guardians can create their own sets of random problems from past Gauss contests to practice using the CEMC’s free, online Problem-Set Generator.  
• Math Courseware: Participants can use CEMC's free, online Courseware to learn and review important curriculum content and concepts.
• CEMC Visits Schools: Experts from the CEMC are available to conduct problem-solving workshops for students and educators. Visit CEMC Visits Schools to learn more. 

The Gauss Contests can be written on paper or online. Educators can select the mode of writing that best suits their needs when submitting a contest order.

Contest Supervisors should arrange to have participants write the contest in school, regardless of the mode of writing, and are responsible for ensuring that participants are supervised appropriately.

Writing the contest on paper

• Participants will complete the contest using the materials sent to the school.
• All paper contests are marked in the school. Contest Supervisors are given a marking template in the contest package.

Writing the contest online

• The Contest Supervisor will provide each participant with a link and an Participant ID to access our online contest platform where they will enter their responses.
• To give participants an opportunity to familiarize themselves with our online contest platform, a practice contest that features questions from last year's Gauss Contests will be made available a few weeks before the contest date.
• Results will be sent to the Contest Supervisor by email in the weeks after the contest is written. 

Contest fee per participant: $5.00

For Gauss Contests, there is a minimum order requirement of 10 contests.

Processing fee per order, applies to all contest orders: $5.00  

Shipping fee per order (not applicable to online contests):  

• For schools in Canada: $5.00 per order  
• For schools outside Canada: 15% of the contest order total, before processing fees and applicable taxes (minimum charge of $10.00)  

Special terms for the Gauss Contests:  

Large orders are discounted after the first 500 to $4.50 per contest.  

Taxes Applied (GST/HST) 

The Gauss Contests are considered a taxable supply in Canada. The rate of taxes – either GST (Goods and Services Tax) or a combined GST/HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) depends on the province or territory of your school’s address:

• 5% GST – Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and Yukon.
• 13% HST – Ontario.
• 15% HST - New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.

Taxes apply to Canadian orders only. International orders are tax-exempt, according to the Excise Tax Act Canada.

The CEMC does not offer refunds, returns or cancellations of any kind. 

We believe that all participants will enjoy and benefit from the experience of preparing for and writing our mathematics contests. Our contests are not tests or exams. There is no passing or failing score. Information regarding the criteria for awarding individual students and schools based on their performance in our mathematics contests is provided below.

Supervisors can log into the Contest Supervisor Portal to generate and print full colour contest certificates onto blank paper, or to print participant names onto the provided blank certificates.

Individual Awards

• A Certificate of Participation is provided for each participant.
• A Certificate of Distinction is provided for each participant scoring in the top 25% of all participants within their own school, for schools with at least 4 participants.
• A Certificate of Outstanding Achievement is provided to the highest achieving participant in their school on each of the Grade 7 and 8 Contests, for schools with at least 10 participants.
• No participant should receive an award for both the Grade 7 and 8 Contest.
• The names of some of the top-scoring participants among all those writing the contests are posted online.

Team Awards

There is no team competition for these contests.

We also encourage schools and boards to recognize and celebrate the achievements of those participants who excel.

Opt-out option:  

We publish statistics and recognize the names of some of the top-scoring participants and their schools in the Gauss Report. If your participants wrote on paper, you are encouraged to submit a list of your participants to the CEMC. Top-scoring participants who wrote online will automatically be included in the publicly accessible Gauss Report unless they selected the “opt out” option, ensuring their name is not displayed in publicly accessible results booklets. If you do not want your participants to be included in the publicly accessible report, please get in touch with us at cemc@uwaterloo.ca