BAPC/Jury

Planning

The following is a suggestion for a planning with enough time to finish all problems.

• March: form committee of about 8 to 10 jury members
• April-May: Create problem ideas, which can be an informal description of the problems.
• Beginning of June: Plan a meeting to pick the problems for both the preliminaries and the contest itself. Make sure that there are enough suggestions, you will at least need 30 suggestions to be able to have some choice. Also try to make sure that the difficulty level is appropriate and that the problems are original. See below for more information.
• July-August: the chosen problems are completed with good texts, testdata, check scripts for testdata, solutions.
• Beginning of September: Proofreading of problems by native English speaker, final check of all problems.
• Mid September: Send preliminary problems to all preliminary organizers
• Begin October: Enjoy the preliminaries!
• Mid October: Evaluate preliminaries, and make final changes to contest problemset when necessary.
• Mid-End October: Make solution presentation slides.
• End October: The contest! Enjoy!

SVN repository

In order to work together on the creation of problems it is a good idea to set up a subversion (or git) repository. A sample setup for automatically building and testing solutions and to create pdf's can be found here.

Problem difficulty

It is very important to pick problems of the adequate difficulty. As a BAPC jury member it is often much more interesting to come up with difficult algorithms than to come up with original simple problems. However, both the preliminaries and the BAPC problemset will need to have some very simple (almost trivial) problems, because there are usually many teams that compete for the first time. Keep this in mind when coming up with ideas.