AIME

@myfuture09 I would go ahead and send it! It cannot hurt - only help :slight_smile:
On the topic of women in competitions, I feel as though the outreach is not there in the same way. Until women and minorities are not second-guessed in STEM, the competition gap will keep widening. On my computer science team, the best programmer is a guy who was encouraged to code since early middle school. However, the best girl on the team started very recently. Although she has a lot of natural ability, she has not had the exposure long enough to place extremely well at the competitions. Competitions generally favor exposure and practice over ability hindering women and minorities’ chances at scoring as well. On a second note, my close friend went to a state math competition and as an African American female, she was not taken seriously. Competitions try to encourage students to go into math, but they fall short when they discourage students who do not have the resources to succeed.

I have 2 kids who are both into math. DD is a math major, but really was not into competition math. Yet she participated in elementary school and that experience was important and positive to her. At her elementary school the math team was run by a woman and the team was very egalitarian—interest/team practice attendance not scoring level determined participation. About half the team was girls and all those girls went on to the ‘advanced’ math tracks in MS and HS. She took the AMC10 and 12 in HS, but never qualified for AIME. But she never studied for it as she wasn’t into competition math and the whole ‘competition/comparison’ part got her down. Also she has dyslexia and doing addition/multiplication is hard and error-rate is like her spelling-error rate. Switch to symbols & logic and she rocks.

DS is not better at math and problem-solving, but he has an unusual ability to do math in his head plus he really likes competition math and it motivates competition math. When he was young, he’d do these ‘Russian’ math olympiads where he had to present his ‘proofs’ to a mathematician judge. He would be sobbing afterwards (“stupid judge. couldn’t understand anything!! waa!”) and yet, the next year he was 2x as determined to do it again. His sister? No way would she do that.

BTW, both parents are applied mathematicians. I (female) like competition math while H hates it. I find the challenge and competitive aspect enjoyable while he finds/found it stressful and not fun at all.