Fourteen years of published results.

AAPT publishes the winners of every cycle, and has done so continuously since 2012 in the current format. Knowing how those lists are structured tells you a great deal about what winning this contest actually requires.

The short version: you are not ranked against the world. You are ranked against your region, within your division — and that is a far smaller field than the entry figure suggests.

Awards go to the top two students and schools per region

The Global Top Scores list is published every year

Structure

Why the region split matters more than the global list

Awards go to the top two students and the top two schools in each region, within each division. A student in East China competes for those places against other entrants in East China’s region, in their own division — not against every entrant worldwide.

This is why the regional lists are the ones to read if you want a realistic sense of what an award takes. The Global Top Scores list is a separate recognition of the very highest individual marks, and it is a much harder thing to appear on.

It is also why knowing your region code before you register is not administrative trivia. It determines the field you are measured in.

Region 00 changes what you can win

Entrants registered through a test preparation centre or educational service sit in Region 00 and are eligible for student awards only — not school or team awards. If you are sitting through a training centre rather than your own school, no team result is available to you regardless of how well the group does.

The most recent cycle

2026 broke the usual pattern

Worth understanding before you read any other year as a benchmark.

In most years AAPT publishes a top-100 list of the highest individual scores. For the 2026 cycle it did not. The stated reason was an unusually large number of very high scores — so many that a hundred places could not meaningfully separate them.

Instead, AAPT recognised every student scoring 38, 39 or 40 in either division on its Global Top Scores list. By AAPT’s own account that was more than a hundred students in each division.

Two things follow from that, and they pull in opposite directions. A very high raw score was less distinguishing in 2026 than in a typical year. But the regional and divisional awards were unaffected — those are still two students and two schools per region per division, however the global distribution moves.

Year	What was published
2026	Exam, answers and solutions. Results with no top-100 list; all students scoring 38–40 in either division named on the Global Top Scores list.
2025	Results introduction, top scoring schools and students for regions 00–14 and 15–21, Global Top Scores.
2024	Same three-part structure, regions 00–14 and 15–21.
2023	Same structure; Asian regions listed as 15–19.
2022	Same structure; regions 15–19.
2021	Winning schools and students, regions 00–14 and 15–19, plus Global Top Scores.
2019	Same structure. 2020 not published
2018	Winning schools and students, with the Asian regions listed separately as a China list.
2017 · 2016 · 2015	Regions 01–14 and a separate China list for 15–19, plus Global Top Scores.
2014 · 2013 · 2012	A single winning schools and students list per year.

The full winners lists are published by AAPT on its Past Winners page. We do not reproduce named student results here — they are AAPT’s to publish, and republishing lists of minors’ names is not something this site will do.

Reading the archive

What fourteen years of lists tell you

Structural

The regional split has widened

Earlier archives list the Asian regions as 15–19. Recent ones run to 21, reflecting AAPT’s seven established regions for Asia and the Middle East. The contest’s non-US participation has been formalised, not improvised.

Practical

Continuity is the honest claim

Same body, same structure, published every year. That consistency — rather than any number we could quote about participation — is what makes a result here legible to someone reading it later.

For how the contest arrived at this structure — and who has edited it since 1985 — see history.

After the exam

How a result reaches you

The gap between sitting the paper and seeing a result is longer than most students expect, and there is a reason for it.

Because the exam is sat across a window rather than on one day, nothing can be scored until every entrant has finished. AAPT sets a cut-off for answer sheets to be received for scoring — typically the last day on which the contest may be administered — and the scoring run follows that, not your own sitting date. A school that sits on the first available day waits just as long as one that sits on the last.

Results are published rather than sent individually: the regional lists and the Global Top Scores list appear on AAPT’s Past Winners page for that year. Your own mark comes back through the teacher who registered you, since the entry was made by the school rather than by you.

AAPT also anticipates two situations that come up every cycle: a teacher who is unsure about a specific question and wants to raise it, and a school finding student scores missing from its return. Both are handled by AAPT directly, and both are the registering teacher’s to raise — not the student’s, and not ours. We have no visibility of individual results and cannot chase one for you.

Set expectations before results day, not after

Decide in advance what a good outcome looks like for you: a regional award, a strong individual mark, or simply a clean run at a paper that reaches past your syllabus. All three are real results. Only one of them depends on how everyone else in your region happened to do.