I am currently a junior in high school, and I project that I can reach platinum in USACO / expert in codeforces by the time college applications roll around for me. How highly does MIT view these things?
The right answer is, “not really / it depends.”
In the past, I did some analysis on USACO Platinum and eliminating non-juniors/non-seniors. And I have emails with Brian Dean of the USACO.
I did observe that a lot of those who were USACO Platinum had other achievements (like USAMO/AIME and/or USNCO and/or USAPhO and/or USABO and/or other things) so it’s hard to isolate just one achievement.
What I can say is that USACO Platinum won’t help you at all if your academics are out of range. That’s addressed here: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/its_more_than_a_job/
On the other end of the range,
And if I were a betting man, I would have put good money that Benjamin Qi ‘23 was on MITAdmissions’ radar. Benjamin was the 2018 IOI absolute winner before applying, and has been at MIT at least a few times to do hackathons. He was a second time IOI (2019) absolute winner.
Somewhere in the middle,
If you’re in the USACO Platinum top ~100 or so,
If you have decent academics,
If you have the right fit, e.g., demonstrating MIT values,
You should have higher than average odds. (Caveats being I don’t know who actually applied or was accepted or what else was on their application.)
Which translates to: Don’t do things because you think they look good on college applications. Only do things because you like to / want to.
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Haha sorry if I sounded a little sweaty, I do competitive programming for fun. I just wanted to confirm because my friend said that he had a group of ~8 friends who had usaco platinum and literally no other ecs and every one who applied to MIT got in (they were in the alphastar platinum class)