On a November night in 2025, a Bay Area high school student sat at his desk preparing for an important test. But, instead of reading a textbook or solving practice problems, he sat staring at a phone. The message on the screen was short. A file had been sent, and inside it, pages of math problems that weren’t supposed to be known to the public. By the time the American Mathematics Competitions (AMCs) began the next day, the student already knew the answers when he flipped to the first page. Alongside dozens of his classmates who had dedicated years to this moment, for the slim chance of passing the test they were about to take, the student sat there confident, already knowing that in a few months, he’ll receive news that he qualified for an exam called the American Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO), one of the most prestigious math competitions in the world that’s considered a stepping stone to acceptance into top universities. With only the top 1% of students or less qualifying for the USAMO, futures were at stake in that room full of test-takers.
While the story above is not representative of one single event, it is a composite reconstruction of many experiences based on message logs and files distributed online by exam “sellers,” individuals who illicitly obtain the tests prior to the exam date and sell them online. In May 2025, after receiving a tip from a Lakeside student about a cheating ring of around 300 people on a Discord server, I began to investigate the cheating for Tatler. I reviewed communications by joining cheating servers on Discord and watching messages get sent in real time. Since receiving the initial tip, Tatler has reviewed more than 300 messages and dozens of images posted by sellers in Discord, and interviewed three exam sellers involved in the management of at least 10 cheating servers ranging in size from 30 to 600 members.
Tatler’s investigation found that this story has repeated itself time and time again in middle and high schools from the Bay Area to the Bronx, from London to Beijing. As far-reaching as this story is, with implications at the national and international scale, this is also one that hits very close to home. Lakeside has a long and successful history with the AMCs, a group of six 25-question, multiple-choice exams that serve as a gateway to further, more prestigious mathematics exams, including the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), which itself can lead to participation in the USAMO. The AIME, USAMO, and its counterpart for students under 11th grade, the Junior Mathematical Olympiad (USAJMO), are collectively referred to by the MAA as the “Invitational Competitions.” The AMC has three levels — the AMC 8, 10, and 12 — which are open to students in and under 8th, 10th, and 12th grade, respectively. It can be taken either digitally or on paper, and that decision is typically left up to the exam proctor, according to the MAA’s Teacher Manuals for the AMC 8, 10, and 12. For example, in fall 2025, Lakeside administered both the AMC 10 and 12 on paper.
According to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the supervisory body of the AMC, AIME, and USAMO competitions, around 300,000 students participate in the AMC 8, 10, and 12 each year. Among them, 50 Lakesiders take the exam annually, and around 30 qualify for the AIME, according to emails from Lakeside Math Team coach Dean Ballard containing rosters of participants. He said that he was not aware of any cheating from Lakesiders, and that he had not “seen any evidence of cheating, certainly at this scale, near Lakeside.” Mr. Ballard continued on to say that “even back just a few years ago, we weren’t seeing anything like this,” describing just how recent a phenomenon nationwide cheating is.
Tatler discovered that over the past few years, an organized and sophisticated underground market has emerged surrounding one of the most prestigious STEM competitions in the world. The American Mathematics Competitions (AMCs) are no longer simply being cheated on; they are being bought. Tatler’s investigation found that at least 60 high school and college students now regularly distribute and sell the problems and solutions to the AMCs, with some coordinating and others competing with fellow exam sellers.
Why are the AMCs so important that students would want to cheat on them? The AMCs serve as the door for American high school students to enter the United States’ elite math competition pipeline. Strong scores on AMC 10 and AMC 12 qualify students for the AIME, and from there, the American Mathematical Olympiads. Top performers in those olympiads become eligible to represent the United States internationally in the International Mathematical Olympiad. As one of a few major ways to demonstrate mathematical aptitude for pre-college students, many value top scores on these exams highly. As stated in a 2024 Wall Street Journal article about cheating during the 2023 AMCs, “America’s top colleges and finance-industry recruiters have long had their eye on teenage whiz-kids who compete in [the AMCs].” Major technical universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology allow students to submit AMC results as a supplemental material on their applications, and top contestants in the AMC competition series are regularly accepted to the leading science and engineering universities in the United States and abroad, according to an article from college admissions database CollegeBase.
Messages reviewed by Tatler show online Discord servers in which sellers openly advertise early access to AMC exams. With invitations advertised on YouTube Shorts, mathematics communities on Reddit, and other online forums, prospective cheaters and “buyers,” as they’re called, have multiple ways to enter these cheating rings. The listings of what cheaters sell that were seen by Tatler resemble menus, and each “menu” names a contest, a delivery window, and a price. Some entries on these listings offer only answer keys, while others promise full packets of solutions written by former participants in the American Mathematical Olympiads. Tatler found that leaked versions of the test and their accompanying answer keys are circulated in Discord servers with hundreds of members weeks before the AMCs begin in mid-November of each year. Pre-order opportunities open in late September and last through October, and sellers often steadily increase their prices leading up to the dates of the competitions.
A full set of solutions for a single AMC test ran between two hundred and four hundred dollars in November 2025, according to the 16 advertisements and public transactions (private “support ticket”-style channels where the deals were made, that were later published to the entire server) reviewed by Tatler. The prices for the Invitational Competitions run between $500 and tens of thousands of dollars, as shown by messages read by Tatler in four separate Discord servers.
Tatler reviewed two direct exchanges between buyers and sellers in which files labeled as AMC materials were posted before the contest began. Tatler also observed messages being sent in real time, including files being delivered through private messages, and in certain cases, leaked to communication channels containing hundreds of anonymous members. In December, Tatler was able to gain access to one such file, after it was uploaded to a private channel that was made public after the competition ended (i.e., all members of the server, regardless of when they joined, were able to see the message). Tatler verified that it contained the actual problems and solutions to the AMC 12A, and additionally verified the timestamp of the message, which was sent a full day before the AMC12A was administered.
According to Mr. Ballard, tests used to be delivered to proctors weeks in advance of the competition date, meaning that both teachers and students had ample opportunity to preview or even solve the supposedly tightly-controlled problems. Beginning in the 2010s, the MAA began to shift to publishing the tests a few days to a few hours before the competition date, according to Mr. Ballard. Up until 2020, reports of cheating on these exams mostly occurred at the local level as a result of proctors and tutors being negligent or aiding cheaters, according to a blog from prominent math professor and AMC proctor Japheth Wood, articles from other school newspapers including Saratoga High School, Fremd High School, and Stuyvesant High School, and a 2024 article from the Wall Street Journal. In 2023, Tatler reported on a nationwide scandal involving these exams that rocked the math competition community, when the AMC 10 and 12 were leaked widely in China.
What makes the 2024 and 2025 cheating waves different from previous ones is that the cheating is far more scaled and organized, in the sense that the cheating is much less a covert deal and much more a business transaction. Cheating on the AMCs no longer looks like a student slipping a phone into the bathroom or a leaked test being circulated among a group of several dozen math coaches. Instead of one singular leak, there are now countless uncontrollable and often untraceable ones, because of the nature of how the test materials are obtained. A 2026 article in The Free Press also noted that AI has exacerbated cheating, saying, “In the past, tests were stolen by unscrupulous proctors and sold online. Now with AI tools, if an exam is stolen, it can be instantly solved — and sold along with the answers.”
In contrast to previous years, where the leak often came from one confederate proctor providing answers to a select group of other teachers or test-takers, exam sellers and cheaters today use several different methods to exploit the proctor verification system, allowing for countless undetectable sources of a leak.
Cheaters no longer have to be in established circles of math coaches and ill-intentioned proctors — all they need is one link to a Discord server. Cheating has become a distributed marketplace with delivery schedules, prices, menus, customers and, most critically, countless sellers. Tatler reviewed messages from sellers aggressively competing with each other, including doxxing the information of other sellers. Some sellers regularly scam prospective buyers, including in three separate instances that Tatler reviewed in which buyers had paid hundreds of dollars for test solutions that they never received.
How the Sellers Operate
In several channels in Discord cheating servers, sellers spoke with a striking confidence that they would never be caught, with one writing that they are “relatively unknown by the authorities and as long as you cheat well, you won’t get caught and you’ll get a good score.” They regularly advertise how many buyers they have served, openly discuss how they obtain test packets and solutions ahead of time (either by bribing school and test officials or pretending to be them), and assure customers that their cheating is not at risk of being discovered.
Depending on the seller of the exam, the method in which they obtain the test can differ. One seller describes their approach by stating they are “able to obtain tests through my parent’s accredited high school and vast array of connections across multiple platforms.” It is unclear whether this seller’s parents truly run a high school or whether their parents aided in their cheating business by falsely registering themselves as administrators of a high school or homeschool. Other sellers wrote that they register as independent math circles with large member counts, which qualifies them to receive the tests one to two days in advance of the exam day, as opposed to a few hours prior. Then, exam sellers work with former qualifiers for the USAMO and the International Mathematical Olympiad (a competition that follows the USAMO and additional layers of selection). These so-called “mathletes”, often university students, are paid to solve the 25 problems on the AMC, often with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence, according to messages sent in cheating servers that Tatler was able to review.
While the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), which runs the AMC and the exams that follow it, has acknowledged isolated leaks in the past, it has not publicly disclosed the existence of any system capable of detecting or tracing large-scale distribution of the exam. In response to questions about the nationwide cheating this year from Mr. Ballard, MAA replied on December 23, 2025 that “protecting the integrity of our competitions is an ongoing priority.” They stated that they have committed to “strengthened security practices across exam development, administration, and review” for the 2025-26 test cycle, while also saying that “some efforts are not shared publicly, as doing so would compromise their effectiveness.” They added that “MAA AMC competitions serve a broad community and are designed to foster a love of problem solving while also supporting fair and rigorous pathways to advanced competitions.” Mr. Ballard shared that communication with Tatler, and the same exact message was also posted online by other members of the competitive mathematics community.
In 2025 alone, 31,608 students from 1,956 schools participated in the first administration of the AMC 10, and 20,438 students from 1,840 schools participated in the first administration of the AMC 12. Students seeking to advance to the prestigious and highly-coveted next stage of mathematics contests in America must perform exceptionally well on the AMC, often within the top five percent among thousands of students in order to advance to the next stage of the academic events, according to data published by Educational Vistas, an educational technology company that provides the MAA with services for computer-based testing and data analysis.
The bar for advancing to the next stage of each of MAA’s competitions, often referred to as the “cutoff score,” is largely determined by the distribution of scores on the competitions, according to the MAA. The more exceptionally high scores there are as a result of cheating, the higher the cutoff is and, thus, the more honestly-working students there are who end up not qualifying for the next round. According to a 2026 article in The Free Press, “In 2022, there were fewer than 30 perfect scores nationwide [on the AMC 12A], based on charts released by the [MAA] … This year, there were well over 300 perfect scores — so many that making the distinguished honor roll [recognizing the top 1% of scorers] required a perfect 150 points.”
The increasing cutoff phenomenon, in addition to mass cheating causing the devaluation of the AMC as a reliable measure of mathematical talent, is why Mr. Ballard agrees with a derecognition of the competition as a legitimate demonstration of mathematical aptitude, should the cheating continue or get worse. “If I were taking a test and I knew a whole lot of people were cheating, that would demotivate me for even bothering,” he said.
Next in this series: the uproar inside the math community and the students caught in the crossfire.
