Should you believe that a problem contains an error that makes it impossible to solve, or that an error has been made in the automated grading of your answers, please email the organising team at [email protected], or submit a ticket on the official competition Discord server immediately. Note that we will not entertain requests to explain scientific terms, diagrams or concepts used.
Rules
Overview
For our returning participants from SChL 2025, welcome back! We've done a major overhaul of the competition with an additional physical round! We encourage everyone to read through this whole rules page carefully.
The Singapore Chemistry League (SChL) competition is open to all JC/CI, Polytechnic, ITE or equivalent international school students in Singapore. You must form teams of 3-5 members to participate. Team members may be from different schools and different levels (e.g. JC1 and JC2).
There will be one trial round and two actual rounds of SChL this year:
SChL 2026 (Trial Round) will be held online from 22 June 2026 to 26 June 2026. This is solely for participants to familiarise themselves with the answer formats and user interface of the website. No scores will be recorded at all.
SChL 2026 (Round 1) will be held online on 5 July 2026, from 3 pm to 7 pm.
SChL 2026 (Round 2) will be held physically at the Nanyang Technological University, School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (NTU CCEB) on 1 Aug 2026, from 9 am to 5 pm. Only selected teams will be notified to proceed to Round 2.
Both rounds will take place on our competition website, so each team member should have access to one personal laptop or tablet. Phones are not allowed in the physical round, so a team member will have to share a laptop/tablet with another team member if they do not have one.
Each member of your team will have their own individual account on our competition platform, with different login details. However, all accounts belonging to your teammates will still be under the same team. All team members will view the same information at any time, and any action you make on the platform will be performed collectively for the whole team.
Prizes & Awards
For Round 1, all teams will either receive an invitation to Round 2, Bronze, Honorable Mention, or a Certificate of Participation through email.
For Round 2, all teams will either receive a gold or silver award, with the top 3 teams further receiving the recognition of 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Teams may additionally receive other awards from NTU CCEB, such as the Women in STEM award. The award ceremony will be held on the same day at NTU CEEB in the afternoon.
Enforcement of Rules
You may:
- Use any legally accessible resources to aid in problem solving (calculators, school notes, textbooks, online websites, videos & google search etc.).
- Please note that you must not engage with the Google Gemini Chat following your Google Search (e.g. do not click into AI Mode, or tap into the AI Chat bar as shown in the diagram below). It is fine to read what is inevitably shown in the AI function of Google Search if it pops up, but do not expand the chat any further to engage with the AI.
- Discuss and collaborate among your own team members via any communication method.
You must not:
- Utilise any Large Language Models (LLMs) such as, but not limited to, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek etc.
- Communicate in any form with another team, including the sharing of any competition materials or answers.
- Communicate excessively with the organising team. If you request our assistance, please send one email / Discord message only and wait for our reply.
- Perform any unsporting or unethical actions that unfairly advantages yourself, including any disruption of SChL's web infrastructure.
- Share your account or access the platform using another individual’s credentials.
Measures Against LLMs:
With LLMs being able to effectively solve most competition problems due to rapid technological advancements, students may lose the opportunity to truly engage with chemistry when fully relying on LLMs. Hence for standardisation, we will be strictly enforcing a complete ban on LLM usage, avoiding inequalities in LLM access (e.g. Claude Free vs Claude Pro vs Claude Max).
Please note the following rules:
- For Round 1, ALL teams will be required to submit workings for questions that have the heading “You are required to submit your full working legibly for this question by the end of the competition”. Failure to do so will result in the team not earning any marks for that question, even if the answer submitted is correct.
- For Round 2, ALL teams will be under close supervision by a member of the SChL 2026 Organising Team.
- The Round 1 and Round 2 performance of each team will be compared and if the Organising Team detects an inordinate difference, the team(s) will be flagged for an interview for the potential usage of LLMs during Round 1.
Consequences for violation of rules:
- Through undisclosed measures, the detection of suspicious behaviour or misconduct will result in the team being disqualified or be flagged for an interview with the SChL 2026 Organising Team to prove their innocence or otherwise.
- All members of disqualified teams will be blacklisted participating in future iterations of SChL. The blacklist will be shared with the other leagues.
- Any incidences of misconduct will also be reported to the respective school(s) for further disciplinary actions.
Answer Inputs
The answers to all problems (Core, Catalytic Craze, Atomic Rush), or parts thereof, are limited to the following formats. Each problem (or part thereof) will state the answer format expected clearly and unambiguously.
| Format | Examples | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| String | ACDE ABC123XYZ FTFTTF 1.234E5 | There should not be any spaces within a string. All leading and trailing whitespace will be ignored. Some questions may ask for a concatenated string with a specific format. In this case, the format expected will be explained clearly. All string answers are case-sensitive. |
| Number | 789000 -24.3901 0.00554 | You may use any of the three different dashes (-, −, –) to denote a minus sign. The precision of your answer (e.g. to 3 significant figures, or as an integer) will be clearly stated. Scientific notation (e.g. 2*10^5, 4.29e7) is not accepted, unless explicity stated. |
| Organic Structure |  | A sketcher tool will be available for you to draw and submit the organic structure. |
String
There should not be any spaces within a string. All leading and trailing whitespace will be ignored.
Some questions may ask for a concatenated string with a specific format. In this case, the format expected will be explained clearly.
All string answers are case-sensitive.
Number
You may use any of the three different dashes (-, −, –) to denote a minus sign.
The precision of your answer (e.g. to 3 significant figures, or as an integer) will be clearly stated.
Scientific notation (e.g. 2×10^5, 4.29e7, or other variants) is not accepted, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the question.
Organic Structure
An in-built sketcher tool will be available on the competition website for you to draw and submit the organic structure.
You are also allowed to use external software sketcher tools.
Errata
Final Remarks
By registering and participating in SChL, you agree to abide by all of the aforementioned rules.
Leaderboards will not reflect the individual names or emails of any participants. Personal data will not be publicly displayed on the website without prior consent.
Should we judge you to have broken any of the competition's rules and/or have behaved in any manner dishonest or detrimental to the progress of the competition, we reserve the right to penalise and/or disqualify your team without prior warning, even if the behaviour is not explicitly prohibited in these rules.
After the competition, you may submit appeals on the grounds of any issues with the problems or solutions, or objections to penalties imposed by the organisers. If an appeal is accepted, we will update all scores and rankings accordingly.
All scores will be final and no further appeals will be entertained once the competition results are declared to be finalised.
If you have queries about any of the aforementioned material, do contact us at [email protected].