Caribou Contest Rules

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Caribou Contest Rules

These are the contest rules one agrees to when participating in Caribou Contests:

• An adult must be present to supervise the contest and ensure fair participation.
• Once started, students have 50 consecutive minutes to complete the test.
• If a student is idle for 30 minutes, their participation will automatically close.
• Calculators are neither permitted nor necessary. We recommend using a pencil and paper.
• Students are to write the test individually, with no outside help
  (i.e. from other students, parents, teachers, cheatsheets, textbooks, the internet etc.).
• Participants may not communicate about the questions before the end of the 2nd contest day.
• Students may only participate in one contest level.

What is Unfair Participation?

Unfair Participation is when a student participates in a contest in a way which violates our Contest Rules, below. The student might not be responsible; instead their participation may be unfair due to the actions of classmates, teachers, or parents. Even hardworking, intelligent students can participate unfairly. Unfair Participation is not necessarily intentional or successful.

Examples of Unfair Participation

Here are some examples of what we consider unfair participation in Caribou Contests. This list is not exhaustive.

The first 1-5 are obvious examples, but some might not believe the 6-10 are unfair. Essentially, these are all unfair because they cause the participating student to make selections that are not based solely on their own knowledge and abilities. For Caribou, these are equally unfair and are treated as such.

Examples 1-5 : pretty much universally considered unfair
1) A student uses a calculator during the contest, whether handheld or on-screen.


2) A student or class has access to formulas which they should know, for example written on posters on the wall, in a textbook, on the blackboard, on a cheatsheet, etc.


3) Students are allowed to communicate about their answers during the contest, or students can see their neighbours’ answers and copy off of them.


4) A student looks up how to solve a problem during the contest or to solve a History question eg. on Google, in a textbook


5) Some students who already wrote the contest tell their friends who haven’t written yet about the questions on the contest.


Examples 6-10 : considered fair in some cultures, but still against Caribou's rules
6) The supervising adult sees that students are struggling with a question and gives a hint eg. "Think about what we worked on yesterday", "Remember that question we did about pizza? It’s like that.", "I told you the Pythagorean Theorem would be useful."
Note: Any hint, however small, will result in students selecting answers in a way that increases the correlation between students compared to students who received no such hint. Our statiscal tools can detect these correlations which on a class level become statistically significant values.


7) A homeschooling parent sees their child is struggling to read the questions and so reads them out, or explains certain words the child does not understand.
Note: help with reading can be given to students with professionally diagnosed disabilities like dyslexia or blindness).


8) A teacher looks at the contest before their students and gives their students a quick refresher lesson on material that will help them succeed on the test.


9) A student writing the contest has run out of time, but did not finish all the questions. Their teacher uses ‘Increase Test Time’ to give them enough time to finish all the questions
Note: Increased Test Time and Remove Test Entry should be used to ensure each student has the full 50 minutes to write the contest eg. to add 5 minutes to compensate when the computer crashes, or to restart when there was a fire drill right at the start of the contest. Special consideration can be given to students with professionally diagnosed conditions like a physical handicap or anxiety disorder.


10) In a non-Anglophone country students are writing the contest in English, but they don’t understand certain words. Their teacher translates the questions and options for them.
Note: When we translate the contests, we choose our wording such that the question remains the same difficulty. If a teacher translates the questions for their students, they may subconsciously word it in a way that makes it easier to find the answer. Their intonation and expression may also give away information about the question and answers. This unintentional help leads to correlation between student answers which our statistical analyses detect. Understanding the questions is also part of the challenge for native English speakers.

How is Unfair Participation Detected?

There are many ways that Unfair Participation can happen, so we have equally as many tools to detect it. We often rely on our Caribou Coordinators to help us maintain contest integrity by ensuring proper supervision of the contest, making sure students know the Contest Rules, and help us investigate suspicious entries if necessary.

          Click here to see a short description of some of our tools.

What are the consequences of Unfair Participation?

Unfair participation in Caribou Contests not only damages our reputation, and wastes our very limited time and resources, it contradicts the spirit of learning. No one benefits from unfair participation, not least the students who are participating unfairly, for their results mean nothing if they did not obtain them fairly. Furthermore, contest results obtained via unfair participation will be removed from ranking or deleted altogether when detected.

If a Caribou Coordinator discovers that students are participating unfairly, they may remove the students’ contest entry on the Coordinator homepage. Note that this is only possible on contest days. If the unfair participation is discovered afterwards, the Caribou Coordinator should contact Caribou to remove the test entry.

After each contest, Caribou Coordinators receive a notification about IP alerts and Jumps in Rank. There is no need to reply to this alert unless the Coordinator finds that it is suspicious.

          Should you respond to these alerts? Click here to see examples.

During each contest, we monitor the use of tools like Increase Test Time and Remove Test Entry, contacting Caribou Coordinators who use these more than is usual to determine whether they are being used appropriately or whether their overuse is due to a technical problem which we can act on.

After each contest, the Caribou Team reviews the results for each grade using the tools described above. When we detect unfair participation or collaboration between students, we remove the results from ranking and send an email to the students’ Caribou Coordinator to inform them. Giving unfair help is treated in the same way as receiving unfair help, so all students involved are sanctioned. When students sign in to view their results, they will see a score of 0 and a link to an explanation for their results being removed. Recidivism will result in their accounts being disabled for the rest of the Caribou Cup.

Caribou Contests Inc. reserves the right to decide whether results were obtained unfairly, and to remove results from ranking in these cases.