Before the school year started, the math league was decommissioned from all schools across the county due to the of the lack of participation from schools and because some of the the questions were poorly phrased and were designed without effort.
The math league would congregate once a week to work on five difficult math problems, which would challenge their logic and problem solving skills. Not only was math league a contest between schools to see who would get the best cumulative score of all participants, but quite often, students who did not regularly participate would be given extra credit for doing the problems.

“Math league was something I just did for extra credit, but after a while, I found myself enjoying it” sophomore Tory Yoon said.
This league was beneficial to students as the extra points  significantly supplemented their grades for many students.
The main incentive for attending math league was the extra credit. Some teachers gave students bonus points if they completed questions correctly. Others would also put bonus questions on the test, which would be related to the higher level math problems done in the league.
“We had multiple times during the year when multiple teachers from multiple schools gave feedback [saying] this one doesn’t make any sense, they would have to come out and say ‘discount this question’,” math teacher Crissie Ricketts said. “Whatever we were getting last year just wasn’t very good.”
For many of the questions, students were often confused. The questions either did not have an answer at all or they just didn’t make sense.
“I enjoyed doing competition math problems,” sophomore Austin Zhang said.
The problems were challenging because they required a different mindset and application of skills opposed to the problems that are taught in math classes.
“It was someone they were paying, who writes questions and then sells them, and they were getting bum questions and so I’m sure it was a financial decision as well,” Ricketts said. I’m sure it didn’t cost that much; it [was] not a budget buster.”
Although the questions did not cost a whole lot, they were not worth the extra cost that the school would have to pay. Also, as many schools started to stop taking part in math league, a survey went out to all FCPS schools to see if they would still want to continue, and since
the majority of the schools didn’t want to participate and the questions were bad, it just ended all together.
“It was a really good way of raising my grade,” Yoon said.
As math classes are getting more and more challenging, math league was a good way to boost grades for students who were not where they wanted to be with their class grade.
“I took Pre-calculus with trigonometry last year which was a pretty hard class (considering I was a freshman), and math league helped me study and practice for the class,” Zhang said.
Many students are taking math classes that are above the average math class for their grade. Including Zhang, most freshmen take Algebra 2 or Geometry, but since he was taking the higher class the extra practice would help greatly.
McLean was one of the top schools in math league. Two years ago the team actually beat Thomas Jefferson High School. The removal of math league negatively impacted many students, but it was a decision that the schools of FCPS had to make.