[severos]

I'm supposed to setup a contest for beginners programming at my university, I've read around and found that the most suitable idea would be having a list of problems and weighting them, at the end of the day the winner is the one who accumulates most number of points.
Does anyone have other ideas of how to hold the contest?? Also anyone got some place to find beginners problems??

[antagon]

How about using existing challenges from coderbyte com?

[Tralen]

Alot of times I just see people tell them to make a grade book. Simple idea, but you are given more points for using things like ArrayLists and Files as well as doing Error-Handling.

[Haxalot]

I've recently began to host coding contests on here, actually (week 1 has just finished, with week 2 to begin soon). Setting up your own contest is a cinch with all of the available coding contest websites available to you.

One of the best (if not the best) is Hackerrank. You can create your own contest on there, select any number of challenges from its pool of over 1,500 coding challenges, choose the start and end dates, and configure various other things in the settings panel. Every challenge has a difficulty associated to it, as well as a recommended points level that can be achieved by completely the challenge (or partially completing it, depending upon the settings you have selected).