Why AMS runs contests, not courses

AMS is an Indian organization that runs national contests in quantitative finance and competitive programming, and builds Access, the assessment platform that turns contest performance into verified hiring signal. We could have built another course platform. We built a scoreboard instead.

The bet

A course tells you what someone was taught. A contest tells you what someone can actually do when the clock is running and nobody can help. Derive '26 drew 2,500+ participants from 30+ institutions across India, out of a talent pool of 5,000+ students AMS has reached so far, and the finals came down to 33 people in a room at IIT Bombay in July 2026. That funnel is the point: most of the noise falls away before round two, and what's left is signal.

What that looks like in practice

• Derive is timed, adversarial, and scored the same way for everyone in the room: probability, markets, and mathematical reasoning under pressure.
• Ascent does the same thing for systems: C++, optimization, and performance engineering, the winter edition of the circuit.
• Access takes that same idea and rents it to firms: a proctored assessment benchmarked against the AMS contest population, not a generic test bank.

A small taste of the problem style

Derive problems tend to reward exact reasoning over brute force. Here's the shape of it, not an actual contest problem, just the flavor:

def expected_rounds(p_win: float) -> float:
    """Expected number of rounds to win once, given a per-round win prob."""
    if not 0 < p_win <= 1:
        raise ValueError("p_win must be in (0, 1]")
    return 1 / p_win
 
print(expected_rounds(0.25))  # 4.0

Nothing exotic: the contest rewards the person who sees the closed form before the person who starts simulating.

Jane Street was the Apex Partner of Derive '26, and QRT was the Convergence Partner for the finals. Firms show up because the scoreboard already did the filtering for them.

We'll use this space for recaps, problem walkthroughs, and notes on how the next edition is shaping up. Start with Derive if you want to see what the contest itself looks like.