Academic integrity

A contest score is only worth something if the person reading it can trust how it was obtained. That is the whole argument, and everything below follows from it.

What we will not publish

We do not publish, host, sell or pass on live contest material. That means no current-cycle questions, no reconstructions assembled from students’ recollections, no “recalled” papers, and no answer keys before AAPT has released them itself.

Past papers are a different matter: once AAPT has published an exam together with its answers and solutions, it is study material, and we will happily point you at it and help you work through it. The line is publication by AAPT, not the passage of time.

Why that line matters here specifically

The PhysicsBowl is sat across a wide range of dates — in 2026 the window ran from 18 March to 3 April. That means a student sitting on the last available day may take the same paper as one who sat a fortnight earlier. Circulating questions during the window does not merely bend a rule; it directly damages the scores of everyone who has not yet sat, and it devalues the certificate of everyone who has.

If someone offers you the paper

Anyone selling or sharing the current year’s questions before the window closes is harming the students who have not yet sat, including possibly you. It is also the fastest route to having a result voided.

Proctoring is the contest’s own safeguard

AAPT requires the exam to be proctored, and sets conditions that exist precisely to keep the result meaningful: parents, relatives and close acquaintances of an entrant may not proctor; a proctor is expected to hold at least a two-year degree, though not necessarily in physics; and contact should come from an official school email address rather than a personal one. Homeschooled students are expected to find an independent proctor — a community college, university or library — and a parent may register a child but may not supervise the exam.

These are not our rules to enforce or to waive, and we cannot approve a proctor. The full conditions are on the competition rules page, and AAPT is the authority on any case that is not clear-cut.

Our own standards

The same principle applies to what we write. Every factual claim on this site is traceable to something AAPT has published. We do not invent participant counts, admission statistics or cutoff scores, and we do not repeat them from elsewhere when they have no source. Where a figure is arithmetic of our own — the 67.5 seconds a question that follows from 40 questions in 45 minutes — we say so. Where AAPT has published nothing, such as the 2027 dates at the time of writing, we say that too rather than estimating.

We also decline to guess at details that look harmless but are not. AAPT groups the five China regions as codes 15 to 19 without publishing which number belongs to which region; we therefore present the grouping and tell readers to confirm their own code at registration, rather than offering a mapping that might send a school into the wrong region.

Preparation, honestly framed

Preparation means practising physics under time pressure on released material. It does not mean advance sight of a live paper, and no amount of coaching substitutes for sitting the exam under proper supervision. Any preparation service described on this site is sold on that basis and on no other.

Reporting something

If you see live contest material circulating, report it to AAPT at programs@aapt.org — they are the only ones who can act on it. If you find an error on this site, or think we have published something we should not have, tell us through the contact page and we will correct it.