The competitions are very useful both in terms of providing students the ability to demonstrate ability that isn't visible within a school curriculum (these stu

The competitions are very useful both in terms of providing students the ability to demonstrate ability that isn't visible within a school curriculum (these students are way more advanced) and motivating the students with something to work towards & train on. I have done this competition (I think) and what your suggesting just is not reasonable. This is a distributed competition administered locally on a volunteer basis. This isn't some formalized test & trying to get Waterloo to pay for all the local proctors would result in this competition shutting down which would be net not good. I don't have insight into how the competition has changed in the 20 years since I took it so I don't know why they don't have local proctors or lost faith in them. Maybe COVID-era adaptations? Honestly, I think the better solution is to adjust the difficulty to be AI-proof but it may be hard to do so at this level of academia.