Unfortunately, I have some bad news regarding Round 2 of the USAMTS.
All of the Round 2 papers were lost by our shippers while en route between grading sites. While there is still some possibility that they may turn up, realistically I am not optimistic that this will happen.
What we are now planning to do is grade both Rounds 2 and 3 simultaneously in late January. This is how it will work:
If you submitted your Round 2 solutions electronically, there is nothing that you need to do. We will reprint your Round 2 solution and have it graded along with your Round 3 solutions.
If you submitted your Round 2 solutions by mail, unfortunately we no longer have a copy of them. Hopefully, you made a copy for yourself (as it says to do in the submission instructions on the website). If so, please send us a copy (and again, keep a copy for yourself) together with your Round 3 solutions. Like the entire USAMTS, this resubmission will be on the honor system: you are pledging the submit to us the same solutions that you submitted in November.
If you submitted your Round 2 solutions by mail and did not keep a copy, then sadly they are lost. What we will do is use your scores from Rounds 1, 3 and 4 to determine your end-of-year prize level.
We still have the list of all students who submitted Round 2 solutions by mail, and we will only be accepting mail resubmissions for Round 2 from those students.
I realize that this is an inconvenience for everyone involved. I hope that this does not discourage you from continuing with Rounds 3 and 4 of the USAMTS. Keep in mind that the primary purpose of the USAMTS is to have fun and to challenge yourself by attempting hard, interesting problems, and that the competitive aspect of the USAMTS is secondary to this. The scoring will sort itself out in the end; the important goals of the USAMTS are to learn some new math and to develop your problem solving and technical writing abilities.
