FAQ

The Leaderboard is refreshed hourly with information from registration forms.  If you've waited an hour (OK, give it 2 hours, just to be safe) and still cannot login, please send us an email.  Your initial password is your email address. 

The first step is to go to your home page.  There, you'll see entries for all the teams you have registered. For each team decide if it's a 3-score team or a 5-score team.  Then, for each team, register the students who will be competing on that team. 

The online platform we are using, HackerRank for Work, requires an email address for sending out a link to participate in each contest.  Students in the Senior, Intermediate, and Junior divisions will receive 2 emails - one containing a link to the Short Problems and the other containing a link to the Programming Problem.  Students competing in the Classroom and Elementary Divisions will receive a single email for each contest. 

ACSL is a competition consisting of four regular-season contests.  Students take all four tests.  Certificates are awarded to top scoring teams and top scoring individual students in each US state and each non-US country based upon cumulative scores after the 4th contest. 

Each contest is available online for about 2 months.  There is a hard date by which we must receive scores.  Please don't wait until the last minute!  The online platform shuts down on the date listed in the Schedule page. 

The advisor can choose to compete as a 3- or 5-score team.  That decision is based upon how many students the teacher realistically thinks will be taking the tests each month. If the team is a small club then a 3-score team is the correct choice.  If the team is a large class or multiple classes then a 5-score team might be the best choice.  Certificates are awarded to top students and teams in both divisions.

A team can have at most 12 students.

Your team score is the sum of the best 3 or 5 student scores that contest.  Those best scores can come from different students each contest.

Absolutely!  There is no limit to the number of teams a school can have in each division.  We encourage multiple teams so that more students will have their score counted towards a team score.  There is a fee for each additional team. 

Yes, but if a student in your program attends a full-time school that has an ACSL team, then that student can only be on the team from the full-time school.  You can still enroll and enrich the student, but the student must take the tests with the school team.

Yes, the teacher at each school decides on the schedule with the provision that all tests are administered by the listed end date for that contest. 

Students can code in Python 3, Java, or C++.  In some divisions, the Short Answer questions use other languages: ACSL Programming Language, LISP, and Assembly Language.  Students do not need to code in those languages; rather, they only need to follow a short snippet of code in that language.  That specifics of these new languages can be taught in one class period using the resources on the ACSL wiki. 

Except for the Classroom Division, the time limit for the short answer tests is 30 minutes.  The time limit for Classroom Division is 50 minutes.  The time limit for all programming problems is 72 hours.  That is running time.  Students may logout and login again multiple times, but the time keeps running.

The ACSL Leaderboard refreshes students scores from the HackerRank online platform every 2 hours. 

If the score hasn't appeared after a few hours, the most common reason is that the advisor changed the student's email on the Leaderboard after the invitation to the contest was sent out.  The score being "pulled" from HackerRank is associated with the email to which the invitation was sent; that email address is no longer part of the ACSL Leaderboard system if the advisor has changed the student's email.

The simple answer is "everything is fine".  HackerRank will automatically submit the test when time expires.  For Short Problems tests, which are multiple choice, whatever choices the student has are the ones that are submitted for scoring.  For Programming Problem tests, each time the student Runs the program, the program is uploaded to HackerRank for execution; the last version that is Run is the score that HackerRank will use. 

Absolutely not. The ACSL tests must be completed individually.  After students have completed the test, it's a great idea to work together to go over the tests, to learn from each other's mistakes, compare programming solutions, and to collaborate on the "most perfect" programming solution.

HackerRank requires that students are required to sign the following statement of honesty before starting:

I will not consult/copy code from any source including a website, book, or friend/colleague to complete these tests, though I may reference language documentation or use an IDE that has code completion features.

HackerRank has developed sophisticated algorithms for detecting plagiarism in programming solutions.  If a student's program is flagged by HackerRank for plagiarism, that student will receive 0 points for that program.  A second violation will result in disqualification from participating in the Finals. 

The simple answer is "probably not".  To see a student's test results, see FAQs #13 and #15.

As the advisor, login to the Leaderboard and go to your HOME page.  From there, navigate to your team's roster (click on the name of the division).  On that page, you'll see the score that each student has on each test.  Next to the score is a PDF link; that link will open a report generated by HackerRank with the complete details of the student's test results. 

If HackerRank returns "Your code did not execute within the time limits. Please optimize your code.  For more information on execution time limits, refer to the environment page.", the issue is often caused by an infinite loop in the student's program or using a brute-force algorithm when more sophistication is needed.

Paper and pencil/pen are the only materials allowed.  No calculators are allowed.  Connecting to the internet to view code snippets or solutions is not allowed.  Getting help from any human source is not allowed.  

An ACSL advisor can be any teacher, parent or other adult with some CS experience.  The duties and responsibilities are detailed in the Advisor Guide.

Yes! Just complete another registration form.  Please be sure to check the box on the registration form indicating that you've already registered a team. 

Students should first look in their spam folder; if the email is not there, and if the email address is a school email, the chances are that the email is being block by your school. Please reach out to your school's IT folks and have them whitelist email from hackerrankforwork.com. 

No.  When you register a student, you can specify whether the student should appear in the published Leaderboard.  This feature was added because some schools do not want names of students to appear online.  Top scoring students will be invited to the Finals regardless of the visibility of their names on the Leaderboard.

When a team registers, ACSL sends a certificate to the team advisor to be presented to the most deserving team member as determined by the advisor.

At the conclusion of the regular season, ACSL will send a certificate to the top scoring students in each division in each state or country (if not in the US), and to the top scoring teams in each division in each state or country (f not in the US).

For the ACSL Finals, the top scoring students in each division will get a prize and a certificate.  The certificates will be mailed to the team advisor for distribution to students; the prize will be sent directly to the student.

We intentionally use only primitives as parameters from our driver to the method that the students code.  As a result, if a parameter is logically a list of numbers, for example, it would be passed as a single string, and students would need to split the string and convert each string into an integer. 

The first solution is to wait a couple of hours: the ACSL Leaderboard pulls data from HackerRank every 2 hours.  Be patient and the score will show up!

If the score still doesn't show up, there are two likely scenarios to check out:

1. The advisor changed the student's email address after the invitation to Contest #n was sent out.  Solution: tell us the original email address and we'll find the results. 

2. The student used a link that was sent to another student.  In this case, the student's score will show up under the other student's name on the Leaderboard.  Tell us the email address of the link that the student used and we'll fix things up. 

The Finals competition is individual based.  Top students from all schools will be invited. Students in the Junior, Intermediate, and Senior Divisions must score 28 points or more.  The cutoff for students in the Classsroom Division is 24 points; in the Elementary Division, the cutoff is 14 points.

Students are able to start each part of the contest any time they chose (until the closing time/date of the contest), once they receive the invitation. We urge students to not wait until the very last minute.