Except his penalty was no longer five points per mistake. It was five points times time correction or about 8.5 points. That is still the right proportion of score, .5% of score per mistake as you say. I'm pretty sure penalty was in the prefactor. If not it should have been.

Maybe the right system, to be fair as Gareth wants for the range of solvers, fast and slow, is a set percentage of final score? If every penalty was 1% or 1.5% of final score (therefore the exact value of a minute or so for that solver) would one bother to check more? Probably. But unlike a flat fifteen points this doesn't excessively subtract from a solver who completes only five or ten of twenty puzzles.

I went to the Monthly Sudoku Contest but the puzzle is not showing inspite of clicking on the Reset button and pressing the 'Control' button while left clicking on the mouse. What should I do?

I assume you mean the Beginners' contest, since the puzzle tests don't have an interface. The puzzles will show only when you've clicked "Start Classics"/"Start Variants" button, and then you will have 40 minutes to solve and submit the answers. As of now there is no record of you starting the test.

Should the password be visible, or the test be non-passworded now? I wanted to have another look at it.

Typically the passwords are removed from the pdfs after the test, but it wasn't in this case.
Password for the pdf : Daf3gIte_New

Edited by debmohanty 2012-08-19 8:46 PM