Official Competition Writing Centres (OCWC)

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 CMS Competitions account, your main menu shows your Location Status and your COMC 2021 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 Ministry of Education

All students are welcome to write the exam. 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. The following will take place unless you contact us to pursue a different option below.
   Your students could continue to participate as unofficial participants. This means that you’d still receive the exams (albeit as digital copies, rather than as hard copies), 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 COMC 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 writing centre and supervised by the staff 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 afterwards.
3. If you have already paid for some exams and do not want to participate after all (unofficially, or at a nearby OCWC), then we can issue you a full refund if you contact us before the exams are sent.

If you are a 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, please reach out to us at contests@cms.math.ca.