Causation or correlation, though? I think we are saying the same thing. A kid who has the aptitude for math competitions will do really well in them and MIT will love him for it. A kid who doesn’t, won’t get into MIT on the competitions alone.
They are neither necessary nor sufficient. And the opportunity cost for a kid who doesn’t have “it” is pretty huge if they are training starting in elementary school.
Again, the definition of success and achievement is in the eyes of the beholder.
I chose “fun” as shorthand for interesting, compelling, constructive, satisfying, and ultimately in the child’s nature.
It’s the opportunity cost on 8 year olds. I have the same concern for kids who are thrust into club sports at the exclusion of exposure to other things (and I hear you, math is different because of its academic applications, but sports are about overall health and adult wellbeing in other ways; the common denominator is the emphasis people put on them for college admissions). It is a marathon, not a sprint.
I brush my teeth because it is good for me and teeth are important to success in life. But too much rigorous brushing can hurt your gums. Some people love brushing their teeth and naturally do a brilliant job at it, and they will have success in life, keeping their gums healthy all the while. Some get OCD and hurt themselves. Dumb analogy, but I still stand by forcing a kid to do math competitions for college admissions is not the way to go about things. Do it because it is right for the kid regardless of college admissions.
Same for my kid. He did AMC10, with some practice. He learned some new math that’s not covered in high school, and the open ended problem solving is valuable in any field. He scored well, but I saw that he had no interest in getting to the next level . He’s moved on to other things and we were never fixated on HYPSM/Caltech etc. We do have an extended family member who was at a pretty high level in these contests and went to one of these institutions and then on to an elite hedge fund.
Our private college counselor feels that very selective college admission for any over-represented demographic in any field becomes a “best of the best” competition. Not sure folks here are just focused on the math competitions. There exists an alternate universe of girls in writing contests as well.
I don’t have time to read the whole thread so my post may be out of line, but here it goes.
Seems there is a lot of misunderstanding around these competitions, mostly among people who know nothing about them. These are not “obscure” but the most prestigious events in the world on HS level if you are interested in STEM.
In our immigrant group of friends, 4 participated in math and physics Olympiads in the early 80ies (in a different country, not US and not in Asia). All got full scholarships to the most prestigious graduate programs here (Caltech and the likes), ended up holding multiple patterns and are very successful in the industry and academia. Most importantly, they are terrific thinkers and problem-solver on multiple levels.
Firstly, the kids who go to the top in these competitions have a natural gift and interest in the subject. They often start reading, experimenting, doing problems for fun at a very young age without any prompting from their parents. Often, their talent is nurtured by a great teacher or mentor, and they are selected for magnet schools or group such as math/physics circles and summer camps. It is impossible for a parent to turn their kid into an academic prodigy, any more than turning an average athletic kid into a junior Olympian.
Second, the material covered in these competitions is not some obscure topic that they will never come across later in life. On the contrary, these competitions go more in depth of the bare bone curriculum offered in the US schools where math kids are rushed to learn calculus in 9th or 10th grade ending up with superficial knowledge. I am talking about public schools as this is where my kids went – a supposedly top public HS. In the country where I and the above-mentioned 4 olympians grew up, they teach calculus and linear algebra in college, not HS. The physics Olympiads for instance, force you to understand mechanics at a much deeper level than most college classes, and certainly better than the 1 semester that you spend in AP Physics C. You learn best by doing problems.
Thirdly, even if your kid is not a prodigy and will not go to the top, the knowledge and skills they acquire will serve them for life: grit, perseverance, ability to focus and tackle very difficult problems, mental connection between concepts, ability to apply an abstract concept to solve a real problem, lateral thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, ability to explain difficult problems when you discuss them with peers, team building when you solve a problem together with your circle buddies.
My son did the competitions, and gain all of the above. He did not put more time into this than somebody playing piano for instance. He is extremely social, plays a sport and goes skiing regularly.
Regarding the Fields Medal winners, this figure is for international winners, not just American winners, right? How much do you suppose these competitions boost the Fields Medal chances of the typical American participant as compared to a talented math student who does not participate? My guess is the change is minuscule.
There is also a tremendous correlation-causation issue at play here. True prodigies may end up winning these competitions, but their participation in these competitions is not what made them math prodigies, or even what resulted in their discovery as prodigies.
Take UCLA superstar Terence Tao, winner of IMO gold medal at 13, and later the Fields medal. By the time he won the IMO medal, he had long been been identified as a superstar in math; he had scored 760 on SAT math at the age of 8, was attending university level courses at the age of 9, and had already been identified and studied as a highly advanced mathematically precocious child. I’m not sure whether the existence of talents like Tao support your premise, or undermine it.
(As an aside, the supporting article is a blog post written by a high school student who (possibly as an EC) was advocating for greater female participation in math contests. More power to her, but it is far from a rigorous examination of these competitions.)
Actually, for some their participation in the competition did indeed cause them to form connections and see patterns where they had not previously done so, and thus was responsible for their development of exceptional math ability. Would that ability have developed if they had been alone on a farm in Kansas? Who knows? But they did get early exposure and training, and became better mathematicians as a result. A high prop of those majoring in math at Harvard and Princeton competed.
Professor Tao’s father was a doctor, his mother an astrophysics major, and his brothers all IMO winners.
Again, the idea of these competitions is to discover the exceptional academic talents, just like in sports. The competitions themselves make these talented kids better, but wouldn’t turn a kid who doesn’t have the potential into a prodigy.
Terence Tao, as someone who has the highest IQ ever recorded, is a special case. He actually won his first medal in IMO when he was 10 and he probably participated in math competitions before then.
Actually there’s a significant element of “discovery” going on at these competitions. Students do get headhunted by colleges as a result of qualifying for the IMO. For example in the UK, the national team has a training camp at Cambridge with the professors there and the top students are essentially auto-admitted.
And going back to the early days, here’s a good example of discovery:
“As a student [in Hungary], he took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, winning two gold medals. Paul Erdős invited Bollobás to lunch after hearing about his victories, and they kept in touch afterward. Bollobás’ first publication was a joint publication with Erdős on extremal problems in graph theory, written when he was in high school in 1962.”
Just as the top math students around here don’t participate in the competitions being mentioned, they don’t play lacrosse, field hockey or row crew either. None of them are offered here. It simply isn’t part of the local culture.
Is it that hard to make it happen? Back in 2015 I asked why my kids high school wasn’t offering the AMC-10/12 when many public schools in adjacent cities did. They actually went to one of those other schools to take the test, and that embarrassed the math department sufficiently that in subsequent years they started offering the test and some enterprising students set up a math club (with faculty support) to practice for it.
The key is to simply have AMC testing offered as a matter of course to those who want to participate, starting in middle school. In fact I think that’s the best “discovery” mechanism for raw talent if you take it for the first time with zero prep.
That may very well be true, but asking why a school doesn’t offer the AMC-10/12 presupposes that someone is aware of it, and that isn’t necessarily the case.
It sure feels like a game, and idea of “education for education’s sake” seems to fall somewhere between quaint and obsolete.
My observations in my community of college bound over achievers are similar to yours. Kids’ lives - their values, interests, and goals - are being shaped by what is in vogue at the AO offices at these elite institutions (and yes, @theloniusmonk, I do “consider MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Harvard admissions to be in vogue.” Believe it or not, what these AO’s value changes over time.)
It is really hard to navigate. We chose schools we thought would provide the best education, but these same schools attract families who seem primarily interested in leveraging that excellent education to get to the next level. And between peers and parents, the pressure to “play the game” is immense. And as you said, kids enjoy some of the activities and they provide some educational value. But oftentimes doing things for education/enjoyment quickly blurs into trying to build an impressive college application, or trying to achieve some others down stream goal.
The whole system has become a competition, and while they can sometimes overlap, education and competition are not always complementary.
There are many math competitions besides IMO level, and many kids participate. I did math competitions/teams for fun during HS, not because I expected it to influence college admissions. Several others from my school did as well. Acnedoctally among this group, there was a wide variety of career paths, which included engineering among others. Only one did a PhD in mathematics. Rather than a career in mathematics, a far more common correlation was everyone who did not pursue a career in mathematics had a career that had strong emphasis on computer science/programming, even if majoring in a field completely unrelated to CS. For example, one kid who majored in a business related field created a successful Internet startup in which he was initially the sole programmer. I think the type of kid who enjoys and excels in math competitions also tends to enjoy and excel in CS, probably more so than engineering.
At least 2 from this group were admitted to MIT – myself and the sole female participant. However, some also attended SUNYs I have no idea whether they applied to private colleges as well. Most students from my HS did not apply to any private colleges.
Sounds like we are back at the nature nurture discussion. Steph Curry is the poster child of talent and grit being a winning combination. That combo exists in math, too.
The difference is that there is a much more robust infrastructure in America for spotting and nurturing basketball talent than math talent. Speaks to our priorities.
Fact still remains that IMO and the like are missing a lot of talent. Probably misses multiple orders of magnitude more than it spots. That’s not an indictment of the competitions, but the demographics of it begs the question (in the original point of this thread anyway) of how it is capitalized on by the people who know about it and how it is applied in the admissions process. Just the same as fencing, sailing, lacrosse, etc raise questions about access and parity.
My guess is engineering-types gravitate to robotics competitions in larger numbers than math competitions. To me, for the purposes of this discussion, that is a distinction without a difference.
One hopes that any kid who pours their spare time into any activity as much as any of these competitions require to perform at a high level, actually wants to do it.
S’all I’m sayinn’. I think I have exhausted the different ways I can say it.
There are many kids attending schools in this country where they don’t know about these and if they did, they wouldn’t have the resources available to offer them.
Yes, there’re plenty of kids who aren’t aware of these competitions. There’re also plenty of talented kids who aren’t interested in these competitions. The competitions are one of the means to identify some of the young talents, but they aren’t the only means. Personally, I don’t think these competitions should be viewed or used as stepping stone to an elite college. Like all ECs, they should only be pursued if the kid is deeply interested (and, in this case, can demonstrate s/he can succeed) in them.
Even in math, a few talents aren’t disovered until late in their careers, like this UNH professor who was 57 when he was “discovered”:
I know at least one college that would consider not only what an applicant accomplished in a competition, but also how s/he did it. A student who succeeds in her/his first try (or first year in the competition) is viewed differently than another student who spends years in these competitions to reach the same level.
Isn’t anyone who is truly an exceptional talent a “special case?” If so, then what do “special cases” like Terence Tao have to do with typical kids drilling for math contests from an early age?
Those talented, hard working kids may advance pretty far in these competitions, and that may greatly boost their odds of admission to great universities, but for the most part these kids are no Terrence Tao’s, and they aren’t necessarily any more exceptional that the science interested kid with the 800 SAT who has never heard of these competitions.