The Intermediate Math League of Eastern Massachusetts has run team math competitions for middle school students since its first contest in March 1965. Each year about 60 teams and roughly 1,000 students from public, charter, and independent schools take part.
How a meet works
- The season has five meets, from October to April.
- Each meet is held at a school in your geographic cluster, with host schools generally taking turns. Teams may elect to compete at their home school and send in their results, but this is less fun for students.
- A meet has five individual rounds: Mystery, Geometry, Number Theory, Arithmetic, and Algebra. Each round has four questions to be answered in ten minutes. Each regular competes officially in three of five rounds, and each round has six regulars.
- A fifteen-minute team round follows, with all ten regulars solving six or more problems together.
- The topics for each meet are published in advance so students can prepare. Many past meets are online for practice.
Who can compete
- The league allows students through grade 8 to compete. Most students start competing in the sixth grade, but younger students are allowed to compete if their coach believes they will find success.
- A team has up to ten regulars, no more than seven of them eighth graders.
- Any number of alternates can partipate and take the same contest, but their results are unofficial. When attending other schools which are providing refreshments, ten is the customary maximum number of alternates.
- A school with many interested students can enter a second team, allowing twenty students to compete officially.
What it costs
- One flat fee per team for the whole season: $250 for ten regulars plus alternates.
- If a school fields two teams of regulars, the second team pays the same fee.
- The only additional costs are the cost of travel to meets at other schools and refreshments when your school hosts.
Fair competition at every level
Teams are placed in divisions based on their results in recent years, and the top three teams in each division earn awards. A school joining IMLEM competes against schools at a similar level, not against the league's strongest teams. New teams are placed into a division after their first two meets.
Want to join?
To see which schools are near you, look at the clusters and their member schools.