MOHS Hardness
MOHS Hardness
MOHS Hardness
Evan Chen《陳誼廷》
11 July 2024
In this document I provide my personal ratings of difficulties of problems from selected
recent contests. This involves defining (rather carefully) a rubric by which I evaluate
difficulty. I call this the MOHS hardness scale (pronounced “moez”); I also go sometimes
use the unit “M” (for “Mohs”).
The scale proceeds in increments of 5M, with a lowest possible rating of 0M and a
highest possible rating of 60M; but in practice few problems are rated higher than 50M,
so it is better thought of as a scale from 0M to 50M, with a few “off-the-chart” ratings.
1 Warning
§1.1 These ratings are subjective
Despite everything that’s written here, at the end of the day, these ratings are ultimately
my personal opinion. I make no claim that these ratings are objective or that they
represent some sort of absolute truth.
For comedic value:
Remark (Warranty statement). The ratings are provided “as is”, without warranty of any
kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability,
fitness for a particular purpose, and noninfringement. In no event shall Evan be liable for
any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise,
arising from, out of, or in connection to, these ratings.
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This will also be my excuse for declining “why don’t you also rate X contest?”; to ensure that there is an
ample supply of great problems that don’t have a rating by me. For example, I will not publish ratings
for IMO shortlist; it is so important of a training resource that I don’t want it to be affected by MOHS.
The PSC ordering is already enough. I also want to avoid publishing ratings for junior olympiads since I
feel younger students are more likely to be discouraged or intimidated than older students.
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Fun story: in Taiwan, during “team selection quizzes” (which were only 110 minutes / 2 problems and
don’t count too much), one often encountered some difficult problems, in fact sometimes harder than
what appeared on the actual TST. My guess is the intention was for training purposes, to get some
experience points with a super-hard problem for at least a little time, even if almost no one could actually
solve it in the time limit.
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2 Specification
Here is what each of the possible ratings means.1
Rating 0M: Sub-IMO. Problems rated 0 are too easy to use at IMO. I can often imagine
such a problem could be solved by a strong student in an honors math class, even
without olympiad training.
Rating 5M: Very easy. This is the easiest rating which could actually appear while
upholding the standards of IMO. They may still be very quick.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2019/1 on f (2a) + 2f (b) = f (f (a + b))
√
• IMO 2017/1 on an or an + 3
Rating 10M: Easy. This is the rating assigned to an IMO 1/4 which would cause no
issue to most students. Nevertheless, there is still some work to do here. For
example, the second problem of each shortlist often falls into this category. These
problems would still be too easy to use as IMO 2/5.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2019/4 on k! = (2n − 1) . . .
• IMO 2018/1 on DE k F G
Rating 15M: Somewhat easy. This is the easiest rating of problems that could appear
as IMO 2/5 (and sometimes do), though they often would be more appropriate as
IMO 1/4. A defining characteristic of these problems is that they should be solved
comfortably by students from the top 10 countries at the IMO even when placed in
the 2/5 slot (as this is not always the case for 2/5 problems).
Recent examples:
• IMO 2019/5 on Bank of Bath
• IMO 2018/4 with sites and stones on a 20 × 20 grid, ft. Amy/Ben
• IMO 2017/4 with KT tangent to Γ
Rating 20M: Medium-easy. This is the first rating of problem which would probably be
too difficult to use as an IMO 1/4, though still not up to the difficulty of an average
IMO 2/5. Nevertheless, top countries often find such problems routine anyways.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2018/5 on a1
a2 + ··· + an
a1 ∈ Z.
Rating 25M: Medium. Placed at the center of the scale, problems in this rating fit
comfortably as IMO 2/5 problems. This is the lowest rating for which team
members in top countries could conceivably face difficulty.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2019/2 on P1 , Q1 , P , Q cyclic.
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I deliberately chose to use multiples of 5 in this scale to avoid accidentally confusing problem numbers
(e.g. “6”) with difficulty ratings (e.g. “30M”). Originally used multiples of 10 until I clashed with a
different scale for some other contest which used multiples of 10. This led to a lot of headache for me, so
I switched to 5. Anyways, 50 felt like a nice effective maximum.
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
Rating 30M: Medium-hard. These are problems which are just slightly tougher than
the average IMO 2/5, but which I would be unhappy with as IMO 3/6 (although
this can still happen). Problems rated 30M or higher often cause issues for top-10
countries at the IMO.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2018/2 on ai ai+1 + 1 = ai+2
Rating 35M: Tough. This is the highest rating that should appear as an IMO 2/5; I
think IMO5 has a reputation for sometimes being unexpectedly tricky, and this
category grabs a lot of them. The most accessible IMO 3/6’s also fall into the same
rating, and these are often described as “not that bad for a 3/6” in this case.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2019/6 on DI ∩ P Q meeting on external ∠A-bisector
• IMO 2017/5 on Sir Alex and soccer players
Rating 40M: Hard. This is the lowest rating of problems which are too tough to appear
in the IMO 2/5 slot. Experienced countries may still do well on problems like this,
but no country should have full marks on this problem.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2019/3 on social network and triangle xor
• IMO 2017/2 on f (f (x)f (y)) + f (x + y) = f (xy)
• IMO 2017/3 on hunter and rabbit
• IMO 2017/6 on homogeneous polynomial interpolation
Rating 45M: Super hard. Problems in this category are usually solved only by a handful
of students. It comprises most of the “harder end of IMO 3/6”.
Recent examples:
• IMO 2018/3 on anti-Pascal triangle
• IMO 2018/6 on ∠BXA + ∠DXC = 180◦ .
Rating 50M: Brutal. This is the highest rating a problem can receive while still being
usable for a high-stakes timed exam, although one would have to do so with severe
caution. Relative to IMO, these are the hardest problems to ever appear (say,
solved by fewer than five or so students). They also may appear on top-country
team selection tests.
Rating 55M: Not suitable for exam. Problems with this rating are so tedious as to be
unsuitable for a timed exam (for example, too long to be carried out by hand).
This means that maybe such a problem could be solved by a high-school student
in 4.5 hours, but in practice the chance of this occurring is low enough that this
problem should not be used. Some problems of this caliber could nonetheless be
published, for example, on the IMO Shortlist.
Rating 60M: Completely unsuitable for exam. This rating is usually given to problems
which simply could not be solved by a high-school student in 4.5 hours, but might
still be eventually solvable by a high-school student. For example, a result from a
combinatorics REU whose proof is a 15-page paper could fit in this category. (In
contrast, a deep result like Fermat’s last theorem would simply be considered not
rate-able, rather than 60M.)
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3 The fine print
Of course, difficulties are subjective in many ways; even the definition of the word
“difficult” might vary from person to person. To help provide further calibration, problems
rated with the MOHS difficulty scale will use the following conventions.
These indicate rough guidelines for the difficulty tiers in which several standard theorems
or techniques should be taken into account.
Here are some notes on what this table means.
• The table refers to minimal exposure, rather than mastery. For example, when we
write “FE’s” as 0M, we just mean that a student has seen a functional equation
before and knows what such a problem is asking, and maybe has seen enough
examples to see the words “injective” and “surjective”. It does not assert that a
student is “well-trained” at FE’s (so for this reason, IMO 2019 is rated 5M, not
0M).
• Here is an example of interpretation. Projective geometry is rated at 15M. This
means that, if a problem has an extremely straightforward solution to students
exposed to projective geometry, but does not have a simple solution without
requiring such knowledge, then an appropriate rating is 15M. (One could not rate it
lower without being unfair to students who do not know the result, and vice-versa.)
• This table is not exhaustive and meant to serve only as a guideline. For other
results which are considered standard, for example lemmas in geometry, a judgment
call should be made using this table as reference.
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
This is most useful to keep in mind in cases where a problem has a lot of correct
approaches; even if each individual approach is not easy to find, the overall problem
might end up being quite accessible anyways.
And it got worse from there. What happened in practice (in what I saw as an observer)
was that many students were getting 4-5 points for 0+ solutions.
Naturally, this inflates the scores by an obscene amount, and this leads to a misleading
historical average. In truth, even among top countries most teams were getting something
like 2 of 6 solves. Even worse, the problem was an enormous time-sink; even students who
did solve the problem ended up with very little time to think about the final problem.
• The problem was C5 in the shortlist packet, and the PSC regarded it as medium-
hard. Some leaders even voted for it as IMO5, during the jury meeting.
• I solved the problem with no paper while at a shopping mall (during the phase
while jury works on problems), and so had no reason to expect it to become such a
historically difficult problem.
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
• I have given this problem to students in isolation before, and many of them solve it
outright. So it is certainly not impossible.
• After finding the main idea, there aren’t many details to stop you. The “calculation”
part of the problem is pretty short.
Moreover, because this problem was essentially binary grading, there is almost no partial
credit awarded, leading to such an intimidatingly low average.
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4 Ratings of contests
As stated in Chapter 1, these rating are ultimately my personal opinion.
• USA TST (USA IMO Team Selection Test) from 2014 to present
§4.2 Hyperlinks
If you click any of the cells in the table, it should open a URL to the discussion of the
problem on AoPS.
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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Evan Chen《陳誼廷》 — 11 July 2024 Math Olympiad Hardness Scale (MOHS)
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