What are the mark cutoffs for competition certificates?

For our competitions, certificates are issued in different bands, depending on what score the participant achieved out of the total number of available points. These bands follow the grading system used in most Australian universities. These bands are as follows:

• Participation: < 50%
• Merit: 50-64% 
• Credit: 65-74% 
• Distinction: 75-84%
• High Distinction: 85-99%
• Perfect Score: 100%

The NCSS Challenge Advanced Tournament has a different grading system. Certificate bands are awarded based on:

• Points earned by solving the problems (50% of final grade)
• Participation (submitting bots) in the Tournaments (25% of final grade)
• Bot performance in the Tournaments (25% of final grade)

Note: for all challenges, a minimum of five problems attempted is necessary for a Certificate to be generated.

At the moment we don't release the distribution percentages of certificates - we try to keep the competitions friendly and without too much pressure on the students to achieve a certain level. We feel that the leaderboard and the certificates are enough to incentivise friendly competition, and based on what we hear from teachers and students we feel that releasing distribution percentages wouldn't be helpful to students.