IDOL

Jump to section: IOL · APLO · Problems by difficulty

# These ratings are subjective

Linguistics problems have incredibly subjective difficulty judgements. In fact, difficulties are so unknown that the people who write the contests make no (or very little) effort to try to order them in any meaningful way.

As a corollary, you should not take what's written here as gospel; anyway, it's probably a bad idea for you to do problems by difficulty^[1]. I find this more useful for myself, but since I went through this effort anyways I decided to publish it. But if you find this useful regardless, all the power to you.

# Notation

All problems are rated on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being "very easy" and 10 being "very hard". In addtion, the true average is listed in a box after (out of 20). Some caveats:

• Problems are rated by how difficult it is to solve the whole problem. This can lead to one problem being rated higher than an other even if its numerical average score was larger, due to how partial credit is awarded. The correlation between my ratings and the averages is roughly 0.5.
• The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that despite the above claiming the scale is from 1-10, some problems are marked with 11. These problems are too hard for contest and probably shouldn't have shown up (they might have had some solves in-contest anyway, but they usually have something that fundamentally makes them way too hard).
• Team problems are rated on their own scale, separately from individual problems. You should not think that a team problem rated 7 is as hard as an individual problem rated 7.
• Some problems are marked with a star ★. These are problems I especially liked^[2].

# IOL

# APLO

# Problems by difficulty