Ok sir, your username please. I am also a LGM from India.

I remember something similar was written on google forms: Choose the higher grade/year in case you are in between grades/years.

To explain it more, Look what "Shivam Bansal" and "Kushagra Juneja" choose in the form? I believe they also passed 12th standard this year. Do you notice the difference? To me, itlooks like that codechef did it so they could easily filter the students eligible for next ioi and icpc, and then select. However it seems this has been misused.

"I have a stronger grip on Algorithms than most students entering college with me" You sure do have, no denying in it. However the next stage would be ICPC. Please tell me why you should be preferred over someone who is in his 2nd year of college and has a lot better current rating than you, after all both of you are going to compete in the same contest next time.

There is something really wrong with the selection list of Students selected under School category

Codechef generally allows some relaxation to school students for io (and that is obvious and valid too). However seems like this is (un-?)intentionally getting misused. Eg: A lot of profiles under school students on https://www.codechef.com/ipc/camp/2017 are students who have actually passed 12th standard and are no more eligible for representing in IOI. Still they are selected. Last year when i was at the camp, i saw something similar happening and its sad that they didn't fixed the criteria this time too.

Anyhow few tips to get selected in next ipc camp :P:

• Get high codechef rating. It is clear they focus more on CODECHEF rating rather then any other platform. Eg: likecs who got selected last year and this year too.

• Get to DIV 1 and STOP PARTICIPATING IN contests. Because if you try to, you might get back to div 2 and that will have negative impact. Eg: SarvagyaAgarwal Vicennial

• Make a Gender Transformation if you are male. They have few reserved seats for Girls :D

Also i can probably guess your original profile from your cf comments. Maybe if you wouldn't have stopped participating in contests after getting to Div1 (and probably gained a higher rating), you could have been selected among the COLLEGE students. But you choose to not participate. Your fault buddy.

He got selected over you because he is a school student elgibile for IOI. You very well know that the seats are distributed for ioi and icpc students. It was like 10 seats for IOI and 20 for ICPC and that is fully justified imo.

As far as reasons given by love_codechef, there is literally no public information. Who were the students that applied but weren't selected (and the o.p believes should have been selected) ? Maybe list out there public profiles and then compare with the ones that were selected. That will make things more clear. As of now it is just ranting venoms. This topic is similar to a topic made few months back that said about cheating by few top indian programmers (i.e. Without any proof)