Are Olympiads Over?

Vladimir Sukhov, a former All-Russian Olympiad prize-winner in computer science who has spent 15 years running programming circles and preparing students for competitions, shares his observations about the crisis in Russian school olympiads — particularly the All-Russian School Olympiad (VsOSh). He participates annually in organizing school and municipal olympiad stages.

The article begins with a message from a parent thanking him for disqualifications: "Cheating has reached absurdity. Other subjects show no resistance whatsoever." The core issue is widespread academic dishonesty — both copying between students and AI usage — undermining olympiad integrity.

Disqualification Statistics

The author reports disqualification rates at the municipal stage for grades 9-11:

• Top 20: 3 disqualifications (15%, previously 20%)
• Top 50: 17 disqualifications (34%, previously 24%)
• Top 100: 30 disqualifications (30%, stable year-over-year)
• Top 150: 45 disqualifications (30%, previously 31%)

Despite implementing countermeasures — mandatory screen recordings at testing centers and distributing problem statements only on paper to prevent photographing for AI services — cheating rates remained essentially unchanged year-over-year.

The Root Cause: Organization, Not Technology

Sukhov identifies organizational rather than technological problems at the heart of the crisis. Clear disparities emerged: municipalities with centralized testing locations and strict internet filtering showed zero cheating, while poorly-coordinated areas — where coordinators sometimes forgot to distribute login credentials — experienced "total cheating" across top performers.

Systemic Failures

School Stage Degradation

The school stage of the olympiad has devolved into what is essentially a take-home exam in mathematics and computer science. Students receive login credentials and solve identical tests remotely at convenient times. The correlation between results and actual ability is essentially zero. This completely undermines the screening function of the school stage.

Cascading Municipal Stage Problems

Because the school stage fails to properly filter participants, nearly all students advance to the municipal rounds. These rounds cannot be consolidated into single centralized testing locations due to resource constraints, forcing decentralized administration in individual schools that lack proper oversight.

Schools lack the human and physical resources to manage enormous testing volumes within compressed timeframes — all olympiads must take place within the first three months of the academic year. Simultaneously, participation mandates increase despite diminished oversight capacity.

Proposed Solutions

Sukhov suggests several reforms:

• Restore centralized school-stage administration — hold olympiads in actual schools under supervision
• Eliminate quotas that pressure schools toward maximum student participation
• Remove participation metrics from school ratings
• Reform the olympiad structure to maintain mass participation while eliminating the identified organizational deficiencies
• Implement serious organizational rather than purely technical interventions

Conclusion

Without organizational reforms, Russia risks losing "one of the finest achievements of the Soviet education system." Computer science organizers can develop technical countermeasures — automated plagiarism detection, code similarity analysis — but other subjects such as mathematics, physics, and humanities lack equivalent defensive tools and face an uncertain future. The problem is solvable, but only if authorities acknowledge it is fundamentally an organizational challenge requiring structural reform, not merely a technology arms race against cheaters.