<p>Any good? How does the competition work, how many people etc. Anyone try this at their school?</p>
<p>Dude...did you just ask if the AMC 12 is any good?? Are you serious? Of course it's good! Pull of a top score on the AMC 12, and you can qualify for a series of contests that lead up to USAMO (top 400-500 students out of the 400,000 that take the AMC)....Qualify for USAMO, and you put yourself in great standing for admissions at all of the top colleges (considering that you have a good GPA, SAT, and the like)...So yeah the AMC 12 is good....very good...</p>
<p>It's basically a math test with 25 questions. The questions range from easy to difficult [it's harder than the SAT Math sections, if that's any comparison]. Each question answered correctly earns 6 points, and incorrect answers earn -2.5 points. If you score at least 100 points, you advance to the next test, the AIME, which is more difficult. Qualifying for the AIME is a pretty impressive achievement by itself.</p>
<p>For some comparison, I think ~30 kids got a perfect score on the AMC 12 last year.</p>
<p>Its pretty damn good, considering (my teacher said) only the top 10 % of mathy students in the US even take it, and of those 10%, only 5% qualify for the AIME. Getting an 80-100 on the AIME is a better statement of your math abilities than a 780-800 on Math SAT. If you do worse, then no harm is done, no college asks you for the score unless its MIT, so you can pretend it never happened. And to be honest, if youre a math team captain, and you dont do the AMC, then... youre not really a math team captain.</p>
<p>anyone try and take the test?</p>
<p>yeah, six times so far.</p>
<p>I took it last year as a freshmen (for the first time), got 145.5/150 on the AMC, got 9 on the AIME, qualified for USAMO, and have since got research offers, invitations from some of the best boarding schools in the country, invitations to various math programs and competitions, emails from professors at prestigious schools, etc...So as you can see doing moderately well on it will benefit you...</p>
<p>Freshman year? Thats very impressive. (145.5 on the AMC 12 freshman year?) </p>
<p>I read somewhere, might not be reliable, thatof the USAMO qualifiers to apply to MIT, 40% were accepted, compared to MIT's average acceptance rate of 10% or whatever. But qualifying four years in a row like you probably will is pretty much guaranteed admission to anywhere.</p>
<p>Oh and only 9 people got a perfect score on the AMC 12 last year in America fyi, you included the internationals in that number, several people aced it in Taiwan, but that's insignificant to most US nationals...</p>
<p>Also, Nick017 what do you mean by "Getting an 80-100 on the AIME is a better statement of your math abilities than a 780-800 on Math SAT." The AIME is out of 15 points...And getting a 3-4 on it is much much much much more difficult than a 800 on the Math SAT...</p>
<p>I meant 80-100 on AMC 12, my bad. Yeah that must have sounded weird.</p>
<p>Thanks. I know at least 40-50 people who have made USAMO and they are all pretty much at Harvard, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford. I'm sure that the 40% is accurate, as many USAMO qualifiers only manage to qualify once (usually senior year) and decisions are already out by the time USAMO qualifiers are announced. Yeah, unless I get arrested or something weird like that I hope that I'll have a good shot at most top schools...</p>
<p>Lol, yeah, I thought you multiplied the score by 10, and getting an 8-10 is much much rarer than a 800 on math :)</p>
<p>I'm signing my school up for it in 2009. It'll be the first AMC in school history. We're going to be at a disadvantage considering I found out about it literally summer before junior year (this year), but it can't hurt to try.</p>
<p>And definitely less than 10% of fairly good math students take it in the US. I'm not sure how anyone would find out about it unless a) a parent is a prof or scientist at some big U b) you go to a really prestigious school or know someone at one (my school is not prestigious) c) you hang out on CC and learn about the 8 million EC's that 1% of the rest of the US has heard about.</p>
<p>Well 400,000 people take it every year, which means that at least 125-150K from each graduating class have taken it at least once, so a decent number of students hear about it...Anyone know how many graduating students there are every year? I have heard numbers between 10-20 million, so idk...</p>
<p>Let's say 135,000 students from last year's senior class took it. With a total of 2.7-2.8 million graduates, about 5% of the class took it. That's still a decent amount, then again I might be living in a vacuum when it comes to sci/math olympiad stuff.</p>
<p>Actually, the more that I think about it, that number should be considerably lower due to the A and B test dates, so I think it would be more accurate to assume that 85,000-100,000 students from last year's senior class took it, putting us at about 3%.</p>
<p>I don't know what this is.</p>
<p>You could read the thread. :]</p>
<p>I know that you don't like to read threads, but skimming the first two replies, which explain the AMC, would have taken even less time and effort than posting what you just did.</p>
<p>It's a math test. I get it. And sorry I don't have fast reading skills like you do so the last part is simply bs.</p>
<p>Which books should I buy if I want to try this for the first time? Currently a Junior taking AP Calculus AB and took Calc 1A in a junior college over the summer and aced it. I think I am capable of studying on my own..</p>