Math Prize for Girls: Who Can Apply and What It Pays

You don’t apply to Math Prize for Girls. Your AMC score does.

There’s no essay, no separate qualifying round, no portfolio to assemble. A student who sat the AMC 10 or AMC 12 in the qualifying November enters their score on a short online form.

The Advantage Testing Foundation checks it against the Mathematical Association of America’s own records, and roughly 300 students receive an invitation to spend a day at MIT.

Math Prize for Girls isn’t a separate competition to go discover on your own. For a student already on the AMC track, it’s the next line on a scoresheet she already has.

We checked every mechanic below against the official application and FAQ pages before writing it down.

What Is Math Prize for Girls?

Math Prize for Girls is an invitation-only math competition for young women, held each fall at MIT and run by the Advantage Testing Foundation. It’s a prize contest built around mathematical creativity and insight, not a qualifying exam like the AMC or AIME. It has run since 2009 and has grown into one of the largest cash prizes in pre-college mathematics.

A student doesn’t sign up the way she’d register for a school math club meet or a proctored exam at her own school. She gets invited, based on a score she already has sitting in an old test result.

The prize money is funded through the Advantage Testing Foundation, which received a $15 million gift from the trading firm Jane Street in 2022 specifically to grow the program. That scale is part of why the prize money is unusual for a pre-college math competition.

The Real Eligibility Rule: Your AMC Score Is the Application

The AMC 10/12 Requirement

To apply, a student must have taken an official administration of the AMC 10 or AMC 12 in the qualifying November. She enters that score, or scores, on the application form. If she sat both the A and B versions of either exam, she reports both. The Advantage Testing Foundation doesn’t take her word for it: every submitted score gets checked against the Mathematical Association of America’s own records before an invitation goes out. Report a score she didn’t earn, and the disqualification is immediate.

A score from an earlier November doesn’t carry forward. Only the AMC 10 or AMC 12 administered in the specific qualifying November for that application cycle counts, so a strong result from two years earlier sits unused once that window closes.

Grade, Citizenship and Residency Rules

Beyond the AMC score, the official rules add a short list of conditions. A student needs to be:

• In 11th grade or below at the time of application, and not scheduled to graduate high school or start full-time college before the competition
• Still a full-time student in 12th grade or below when the competition itself takes place
• A resident of the United States or Canada, or a US citizen or permanent resident living abroad

The official criteria also specify female gender identity, which is the “for Girls” half of the name. A family already comparing AMC 10 vs AMC 12 for a daughter should check this list early, before assuming a strong score alone settles the question.

A ninth grader who clears the cutoff competes against the full field for the main prizes and is also eligible for the $2,000 Youth Prize if she posts the best score among that younger group. Both prizes aren’t stacked. A Youth Prize winner is still judged against the full field for the main placements too, evaluated on the same 20 problems as everyone else.

How Invitations Work

The Advantage Testing Foundation doesn’t rank every applicant against every other applicant. It sets a cutoff separately for the AMC 10 and a cutoff separately for the AMC 12, then invites everyone who scored above the relevant cutoff on either exam. The official FAQ describes that cutoff as sitting a little above the score needed to qualify for the AIME, the exam that already funnels a smaller group of AMC 10/12 scorers into a harder round. A student who already knows what counts as a good AMC score for AIME qualification has a rough sense of where the Math Prize for Girls line sits too, just a notch higher.

About 300 students receive an invitation in a given year. There’s no waitlist to petition and no essay to submit if a score lands just under the line.

The application window typically opens in spring, once the qualifying November’s AMC results are final, and closes by early summer. Invitations go out in July, well before the contest itself runs at MIT that fall.

Is a Borderline Score Worth Applying With?

There’s no fee. No essay. No letter of recommendation to chase down before a deadline. The AMC 10 or 12 already happened in November, and the MAA already has the score on file whether or not a student applies. Filling out the application form takes minutes.

A score sitting right at the edge of the cutoff still has a real shot, since the Advantage Testing Foundation sets a separate cutoff for the AMC 10 and the AMC 12 and evaluates a student who sat both against whichever cutoff she cleared. A student who scored well on the AMC 10 but did worse on the AMC 12 that same November still gets judged on the stronger result.

Inside the Competition

The contest itself runs 2.5 hours: 20 questions, every answer a specific number rather than a multiple-choice letter. No calculators. No calculus. The problems are built to test mathematical creativity and insight more than speed on routine material, and they’re held each fall at MIT.

That’s a shorter question count than the AMC 10 or AMC 12’s 25 questions, with a longer time budget per problem. A student used to AMC pacing, where a blank answer still earns partial credit, needs a different mental model here. Every one of the 20 questions is worth attempting; there’s no reward for leaving one blank.

Scoring is simple: one point for a correct answer, zero for an incorrect one. There’s no guessing penalty the way the AMC docks a wrong answer relative to a blank, so a competitor who runs out of time is better off filling in a best guess than leaving a hard problem empty.

When scores tie, the prize money splits evenly between the tied students. Which trophy each one takes home, when trophies are ranked, comes down to who did better on the harder problems in the set.

What Winners Get

Prize	Amount
Total prize pool	$100,000
Top prize	$50,000
Youth Prize (top score in 9th grade or below)	$2,000

The Advantage Testing Foundation splits additional prize money among other top scorers beyond the two headline figures above. The full current-year tier breakdown lives on the official prizes page, worth checking directly rather than relying on a secondhand total.

Where This Fits in an AMC-Track Plan

Gonit’s practice bank covers grades 1 through 10 right now, with grade 11 still being built out. Most of the eligible band already has full coverage on the app.

An 11th grader specifically drilling AMC 12-level material ahead of a Math Prize for Girls application will find the grade 11 content still catching up to the rest of the bank. That’s a real gap, not a marketing footnote.

What the app does cover is the AMC 10 and AMC 12 practice that sets up the score this whole eligibility rule runs on. That practice is organized by topic instead of mixed at random: algebra and geometry in one track, combinatorics and logic in another, and data and probability in a third.

That matters more for Math Prize for Girls prep than generic mixed practice, since AMC and Math Prize problems both cluster around specific techniques, and a student can drill the exact area cutting into her score instead of repeating problems she’s already fast at.

If raising an AMC score itself is the goal, the site’s roundup of free AMC practice resources is a reasonable next stop alongside Gonit’s own grade-wise question bank.

Score high enough on an AMC 10 or 12 in November, and there’s nothing left to go looking for. Math Prize for Girls already has your number.

Submit the score, let the Advantage Testing Foundation verify it against the MAA’s own records, and spend the months before the deadline drilling the AMC problems that actually move that number.

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