About

The Programming Jam 9.0 is an annual programming contest that is organized by the ACM Professional Chapter in Saudi Arabia annually in Prince Sultan University. After the successful previous events, this year, this competition will be open to all students of Universities in Saudi Arabia, as a new form of gathering programmers at national level and as a joint event among Saudi Universities.

This programming contest falls under the umbrella of ACM Professional Chapter in Saudi Arabia and is organized by the College of Computer and Information Sciences of Prince Sultan University to nurture the innovation, creativeness and collaboration to help and support new groups of software programs. It also helps the students to test their ability to perform well under pressure with limited time. The contest will follow the format of the traditional ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). It is going to be 9 hours online coding competition where wide community of colleges and universities students can participate to engage themselves with challenging question about programming.

Duration

09 hours
from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm

Participants

Any undergraduate student in Saudi Universities

Remote

Virtual event. No physical attendance at PSU premises

Winner Awards

Valuable awards for the three first winners

Rules

  • A College or University can have more than one team with three collegiate students in each team. The university faculties are required to proctor the teams.
  • Every team has to provide the name of the mentor and his/her email address.
  • The university can assign the task of proctoring to different faculty or staff so as to have an effective invigilation during the programming contest session. Every university has to provide the name of the proctor(s) along with some necessary information as mentioned in Proctor Form.
  • Programming Jam 9.0 is a virtual Event. There is no need for physical attendance in the premises of Prince Sultan University, but students will work from their Universities through the Hackerrank system.
  • Team members must have ability to quickly figure out the difficulty of the problems, catch the requirements, design and build software system to solve the problems under the strong scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-trained team, some of the problems require precision only while others require knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. The team that solves the most problems with the least penalty points (see rules) is declared the winner.

Eligbility

Conditions that teams have to satisfy

  • Participants must compete as part of a team. Teams are comprised of up to 3 graduate or under graduate students currently doing their study in a Saudi University, governmental or private.
  • There is no restriction on students declared major program of study. Student from all major programs of study are welcome.
  • All contestants must register before the competition.
  • Team members must solve and complete the problems without assistance from others. Please note that the intent and spirit of the competition is for the students, not others, to solve a problem..
  • Teams must have a proctor to supervise during the 09 hours competition. Each team must provide the name of proctor when registering. Persons acting as proctor must limit the level of support and must not contribute in any other form that might be considered original authorship, or in any way that may enable claims of rights or ownership to the submitted entries. Proctors in no case will work-on-behalf of teams or individuals be allowed. Proctors would have to monitor student throughout the period of the competition.

Role of Proctor

  • Teams must have at least one proctor to supervise during the 09 hours competition.
  • Proctors would have to monitor students throughout the period of the competition.
  • Persons acting as proctor must limit the level of support and must not contribute in any other form that might be considered original authorship, or in any way that may enable claims of rights or ownership to the submitted entries.
  • Proctors should not be allowed to work-on-behalf of teams or individuals in all circumstances.
  • An e-certificate will be provided to the proctors by the ACM-Saudi Arabia Chapter.

Programming Problems

  • Problems are designed and developed by a panel of expert programmers.
  • The panel of judges is made up of experienced programmers.
  • All contestants must register before the competition.
  • Problems will be categorized as MEDIUM, and HARD to allow for participants of all experience levels to participate.
  • All of the problems must be answered in Java.

Problems Submission

  • Problems would be posted on competition website at exactly at 9:00 AM (02 March 2023).
  • Students are required to submit solutions to the problems online.
  • Each submission would be time stamped (extra points awarded for early submission).
  • Competition will close precisely at 6:00 PM the same day. All submissions after the deadline would be ignored.
  • Students are encouraged to solve as many questions as possible to improve their chances of winning.

Scoring Criteria

  • Scoring is based on problem difficulty and time until completion.
  • Each problem is worth a certain value of points.
  • ACM professional chapter,KSA retains the right to review the contestants’ submissions with tools and techniques to detect acts of plagiarism. ACM professional chapter,KSA reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to disqualify any team that is identified (during or after the competition) for inappropriate collaboration, reuse of material, and/or failing to meet the requirements as indicated by the PJAM rules
  • After the competition day, the PJAM technical committee will be evaluating code submissions. The official results will be communicated within 3 days after final evaluations are complete. Winners and the proctors for their teams will be contacted by PJAM Organizer.
  • Contestants will be ranked in order of the highest score first and lowest score last.
  • Any special scoring rules or bonus points will be announced with the problems.

Winners

  • Winners will be determined strictly based on the overall score earned by a team.
  • In the event of a tie between contestants, the one with lower timestamp (submitted earlier) will be declared winner.
  • Winners will be announced on ACM Chapter Competition events website

Prizes

  • The winning team members will each receive an award certificate.
  • Award certificates will be given to only the first three first winners:
    • GOLD AWARD CERTIFICATE, for the first place
    • SILVER AWARD CERTIFICATE, for the second place
    • BRONZE AWARD CERTIFICATE, for the third place
  • All active participants in the competition will receive a participation certificate, for their efforts and participation.
  • Results will be published on the ACM Chapter Competition website.

Agreement to official rules

  • By participating in this contest, participants agree to abide by the terms and conditions.
  • By submitting code, students give full rights of ownership of the submitted code to PSU-ACM.
  • PSU-ACM pledges to keep all personal information safe provided during the registration period.
  • Students must provide their current university ID, full name, phone number and personal email address.
  • By accepting the prize, PSU-ACM reserves the right to use students’ names, photos (male only) etc in future advertisements for the competition.
  • The competition is open for currently registered university students only. PSU staff and faculty are not eligible to compete.
  • Competition Organizers reserve the right to disqualify teams violating competition rules for any or all of the following breaches:
    • Providing false information about yourself during registration would result in disqualification.
    • Sharing/using from others any information about a problem (including its content/solution) before the end of the competition.
    • Any kind of discussions between teams is strictly prohibited and would result in disqualification of both or more teams.
    • Submitting unethical, lewd, obscene or any kind of morally unacceptable content.
    • Violation of PSU ethical terms and conditions for students.

Contact

  • If you have any issues or questions about general contest procedures please feel free to contact our helpdesk team during the competition writing email to pjam@psu.edu.sa
  • Please note the helpdesk team will NOT answer questions related to the programming problems nor provide extra examples or any other information.

Registration Steps

To register to the event, follow these steps accurately

A detailed guide is provided on this link Download the guide

  • Build a team from University students.
  • Create an account for the team in Hackerrank.
  • Choose a faculty member from your University as mentor.
  • Register the team here
  • Then, the mentor should contact us on pjam@psu.edu.sa to confirm your team registration.
  • To know how to create a team in Hackerrank, you can follow this guideline.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • When is the Contest? 02 March 2023.
  • Who is organizing the contest? Umbrella of ACM Professional Chapter KSA and going to be organized by CCIS of PSU.
  • Where will be the contest? Online.
  • Where to register for the contest? To Register in PSU-National Programming Contest, please click here
  • How many teams of each university can participate in the contest? There is no limitations
  • How many students on each team? Teams are comprised of up to 3 graduate or under graduate students.
  • What is the style of the contest, and the difficulty level of the problems? Contest is 09 hours. Each time a set of 8 to 14 short problems will be given. Some problems require only basic knowledge of the programming. Other problems require strong knowledge of basic mathematics, data structures and strong knowledge of algorithms.
  • What is the style of the problems? The style of problems follows from the famous ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The best way to see the style of problems is to view archives of the ACM ICPC: https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems
  • How do the team members contribute to solve a problem? Does each team member have a specific task? The team members should browse the problem set and attempt to identify the problems that can be solved by them with confidence. Then, they work together, as a team, to solve the problem. If successful, they submit the problem through the software interface provided, and they continue in this process for the duration of the contest.
  • How are submitted problems judged? For each problem, students are given a sample input and a correct sample output that should be expected. Once their program is working (or seems to be working), they can submit their solution. The solution will be run against a larger set of input from the judges; this input set is more comprehensive, with the intention of testing all possible cases. Students should pay close attention to the input and output description to make sure they have correctly considered all possible scenarios. Upon running the student submission, if the team’s output matches the judges output, then the team submission is accepted.
  • How can our team members prepare for the contest? Team members can practice for the competition by trying to solve problems of previous programming competitions such as IEEE programming competitions and ACM programming competitions.
  • Is code documentation considered when judging the programs? No. We will be following the ACM ICPC format. Programs are strictly judged according to their ability to correctly solve the judges input file.
  • What programming languages knowledge is required to enter the competition? The official and unique language of the contest is Java for this year.

Organizers

Sponsors

Support

For more info and support, contact us!

Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

pjam@psu.edu.sa

+966 11 4948287