Divisions within a contest

[prandla]

This one is quite a lot more niche than my other issues I think, but maybe still worth discussing :)

In the Estonian olympiad, we have a system where high-schoolers have 6 tasks available, and their score for the contest is the sum of their top 3 tasks. However, middle-schoolers (by default) only have the first 4 tasks, and all 4 count for their score.

We implemented this by adding a feature that allows hiding some tasks for some users (grouped into divisions), and later I also implemented the scoring rules (which used to just be excel formulas in the results spreadsheet) into CMS, allowing each division to have a different scoring mode. ("scoring mode" is already an overloaded term though.... need to think of better terminology). This also involved implementing the scoring rules in RWS, and allowing filtering the ranking to a specific division.

Would any part of this be a candidate for upstreaming? Or are our rules too weird? :)

[veluca93]

IMO, as described this is a bit too complicated.

It might make sense to implement some functionality that might make this easier to achieve though -- for example, sharing tasks between contests (which would allow to implement the "hiding"), and implementing some additional variants of contest-wide scoring (beyond "max by subtask" and "max by submission")

[prandla]

I think just implementing sharing tasks would require some extra work to be as useful. We occasionally need to change the division on some user (e.g. when a middle schooler solves all 4 tasks and we want to give them the last two aswell), so it would require carrying over the submissions for tasks that appear in both contests. but maybe it would still be workable.