Berkeley Math Tournament 2022

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Welcome to Berkeley Math Tournament 2022! BMT 2022 will be in-person, with various satellite tournaments and an informal, online rerun. The tournament will consist of 3 main rounds — Power, Guts, and General/Focus.

Registration will open on Tuesday, September 20th, 2022.

BMT is open to high school students in grades 12 or below. In particular, there is no lower age limit to compete in BMT; middle schoolers and advanced elementary students are welcome to compete. Our middle school tournament will also be held in the spring. Coaches can register up to 6 students per team. There are no restrictions on how many teams/students a single coach can register. You do not have to be local to the Bay Area or California to register for BMT.

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Registration Information

Registration, Waivers, and Pricing

Dates	Registration Period	Price Per Student
9/19 – 10/15	Normal Registration	$20
10/15 – 10/31	Late Registration	$30 and there is no guarantee of contest swag.
*For students facing financial hardship, please contact finance@bmt.berkeley.edu for a fee waiver* As long as students register during normal registration, they will receive BMT shirts and swag as well as T-shirts and other company giveaways from our sponsors. We will not honor refunds during late registration.

We are now using a new registration portal. Coaches may register up to 6 people per team, and ContestDojo will allow them to assign and modify teams up until tournament day. All contestants are required to have their parent/guardian sign UC Berkeley’s consent waivers through this portal. Contestants will NOT be allowed to take the contest without having a signed liability and consent to treatment waiver. Any questions about managing the teams on the portal should be directed to us at questions@bmt.berkeley.edu.

Student Eligibility

1. Students must be in grade 12 or below to be eligible for BMT. Middle school students in particular, are encouraged to participate. 
   
2. Students do not have to be local to the California Bay Area or the U.S. to participate in BMT. Please see “Satellites” and “BMT Online” for other options on tournaments. 
   
3. Coaches/Institutions may register multiple teams. We ask that for every 2 teams, there is at least 1 parent chaperone.
   
4. Due to room capacity constraints, we will cut-off registration at around 1000 students on a first-come, first-serve basis. 

Team-Finder

Students may register as a team of 1, however, it is beneficial to compete on a team of at least 4 due to our scoring guidelines. For students who do not have a full team, we organized a “Team Finder” document. Follow all outlined steps in the document.

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Tiebreakers

The tiebreakers will be held for the top scoring students in each of the individual rounds. Tiebreaker qualifies will be announced at the end of the Guts round, and will be a 15-minute test. The test will consist of three questions for the focus rounds, and five questions for the general round, and be scored primarlily on correctness and secondarily on submission time, That is, an earlier submission will be worth more than a later one with the same number of correct answers, but less than a later one with more correct answers.

Students may choose 2 Focus rounds to take (from Algebra, Geometry, Discrete, and Calculus) OR the General Round.

Summary

	Power	Focus x 2	General	Guts
Important Details	Proof-Based	Students may choose 2 Focus rounds to take (from Algebra, Geometry, Discrete, and Calculus) OR the General Round		Once answers to a set are submitted, they cannot be edited
Location	Assigned Classrooms – See Tournament Guide			Auditorium
# of Questions	TBA	10 Each	25 total	27 total
Duration	90 mins	60 mins each	90 mins	75 mins
% of Score	30%	40%		30%
Important Scoring Notes	N/A	The General Round will only count for half as many points as the Focus combinations		N/A
Collaboration?	Yes	No, students will work individually		Yes

Acceptable Answers

Students are responsible for familiarizing themselves with the acceptable test formatting document and common notation document for details on how their answers should be submitted. Answers not submitted in the listed formats will be graded as incorrect, even if equivalent.

Scoring

Focus / General: To calculate the focus / general score, we will take the average of every team member’s score on their individual portion if the team has 4, 5, or 6 members. If the team has fewer than that many members, we will add 0’s until the team has reached at least 4 scores, of which we will take the average. While individuals are allowed to register a 1-person team, we highly encourage students without a team to use the Team-Finder to create a team of at least 4.

All scores for a given round will be normalized by either the top 10 students or the top 10% of all scores, whichever is bigger.

If a student takes the General Round instead of the two Focus rounds, their score will only count for half as many points as the Focus combination will.

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Schedule

Start Time (PT)	Student Events		Coach + Parent Events
8:00 AM	Check-In Wheeler Lobby		Bagels + Coffee Dwinelle 145
8:30 AM
9:00 AM	Power Round (90 mins) + Break See Tournament Guide		Po-Shen Loh Talk Dwinelle 145
9:30 AM
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
11:00 AM	Focus #1 (60 Min) + Break + Focus #2 (60 Min) See Tournament Guide	General Round (90 Mins) See Tournament Guide	Campus Tours + Lounge See Tournament Guide
11:30 AM
12:00 PM
12:30 PM
1:00 PM		Break
1:30 PM	Lunch
2:00 PM
2:30 PM	Guts Round (75 Min) See Tournament Guide		Campus Tours + Lounge See Tournament Guide
3:00 PM
3:30 PM
4:00 PM
4:30 PM	Activities / Tiebreakers See Tournament Guide
5:00 PM
5:30 PM
6:00 PM	Closing Ceremony Wheeler 150
6:30 PM

Student Activities

The following activities will be offered to students during the Activities / Tiebreaker period.

Combo Games – “I’m going to win! No wait, I’m going to lose!” Get lost in strategy and always being one or two moves ahead of your opponent in combinatorial games! Learn how to win at just a single glance (and how to jump ship when you’re going to lose) in fun combinatorial games! See Tournament Guide.

Dicey Duel – Battle against other competitors in this game of dice, luck and strategy. Players will participate in rounds against each other after building your optimal set of equipment. Test your ability to make the strongest class and turn the odds in your favor. See Tournament Guide,

Estimathon – A team-based contest that combines trivia, game theory, strategy, and mathematical thinking. Teams of ~3 will be under a time limit to work on a set of 13 Fermi-style problems.See Tournament Guide.

Integration Bee – Compete head to head against the best integrators around! Students will face off in a tournament style bracket, solving difficult integrals involving some clever tricks, to determine who will be the champion of all integrators. See Tournament Guide.

Parent Activities

Bagels + Coffee

BMT will be providing a light breakfast and coffee for parents and coaches throughout the day. In the lounge, parents + coaches will be served muffins, bagels, and coffee.

Po-Shen Loh Talk

Building Long-Term Success, Starting From Math

Life is long. The ~15 year period of contests, academics, and exams makes up a small fraction of that lifespan, but the decisions made during those years can significantly improve what the rest of life looks like. The speaker has closely observed the life journeys of 2 decades of math contest stars, starting from his cohort when he was on the International Math Olympiad team, to the present day. He has observed practical ways for many people to develop extraordinary math skills, which generalize into even more extraordinary technical abilities. However, he has also observed that those technical skills alone are not enough for the more complex game of life. In this talk, he will share some of these observations and advice.

The speaker is Po-Shen Loh (https://poshenloh.com/), a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the national coach of the USA International Math Olympiad team. He uses math to devise new solutions to real-world problems and has appeared in national and international newspapers for several discoveries. These days, he runs a program that guides high school math stars to develop extraordinary communication and performance skills (https://live.poshenloh.com/stars), while teaching middle and elementary schoolers how to invent their own ways to think about math (https://live.poshenloh.com/).

Campus Tours

BMT Staff will be offering a campus tour to parents while students are taking BMT. These tours will be all across the UC Berkeley campus, visiting some of the historical architecture and art found across campus.

Lounge

The Parent + Coaches’ lounge will be located in Dwinelle 155, and will remain open from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, after the conclusion of the Guts round. Parents, coaches, and students wishing to remain on campus are welcome to find space in Wheeler 200 and 202.

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Day of Logistics

Awards

General

Focus Rounds

Guts Round

Power Round

Overall

Room Assignments

BMT will give out room assignments to teams where they will take several tests during the day. Classroom assignments will be posted closer to the competition date.