For non-mathematics majors, the national college students' mathematics competition is basically an advanced mathematics competition (only advanced mathematics is tested in the preliminaries, and some lines are tested in the finals). The difficulty of undergraduate advanced mathematics can be ranked from middle to upper, which can be said to be a very important and difficult basic course for engineering students.

Therefore, students who intend to participate in CMC must first master the advanced mathematics courses of undergraduate students. If you can't master the content in class and pass the final exam, I think it is unwise to abandon the basics and study CMC directly:

On the one hand, difficult topics often need to comprehensively examine multiple knowledge points or use some skills. If the foundation is not solid, it is difficult to extract the points that need to be learned and improved from CMC topics, and then it is difficult to get feedback;

On the other hand, the accumulation of confusion and frustration in solving problems will hit the self-confidence in learning advanced mathematics. Only by starting with the basic concepts and laying a solid foundation can we achieve mastery, and then master some common skills through CMC training to improve our ability.

Competition test questions

Because the number of participants is increasing year by year, it is usually less difficult to win the prize in the preliminaries. According to the experience of three competitions, as long as you basically master the concept of advanced mathematics and the method of solving problems, you can get good grades in the final exam, and you are hopeful of winning the prize after a period of preparation. When you can master all kinds of concepts in advanced mathematics courses and deal with advanced mathematics classroom exercises and final exams freely, this level can already win the first prize in the preliminaries.

Because the difficulty and overall level of the competition questions in each competition area are different every year, it is difficult to accurately match the scores with the award-winning level. Combined with the experience of participating in the competition, the author thinks that 30%-40% of the topics in the preliminaries can win prizes, and more than 60% of the topics are expected to win the first prize.