A related problem is that some take what may be considered by some to be unfair advantage in areas that the rules cannot cover, or engage in political maneuvering to manipulate the rules or enforcement of rules in their favor.
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Colleges need tangible values for deciding who to admit. Which of these measurable values are not highly dependent on socioeconomic and cultural differences?
Colleges canāt fix the awful and broken school system. They surely try to correct for some of the problems, but until the school system is made more fair, and the kids of the scientist and the janitor are given the same fair start, there will always be unfairness.
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I donāt think anyone here is suggesting that. What theyāre pushing back on, rightly or wrongly, is using competitions that a large swath of the country doesnāt even know exists, to determine the ābest of the best.ā Using these competitions for that purpose is very much like saying you want to determine who the best athletes are and doing it by only looking at lacrosse players.
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Just another example of the utter failure of our public k-12 schools. You would think that the mostly college graduate teachers in our country would be aware of such competition across all subjects (not just math).
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In the time of the internet, knowledge of these competitions is as accessible as anything else, including elite sports, which provides an advantage.
My kid attended several competitive international camps. Always in attendance was at least one incredibly talented poor kid from rural Africa or Asia who had worked hard to find these opportunities and get funded for the travel. Sometimes even participating shows a lot of effort
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Well as long as āat least one incredibly talented poor kidā has access, then I guess there is nothing to worry about. 
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Gopal Goel also won a silver medal on the IMO and has committed to be part of MIT Class of 2025.
Jimmy Qin was at Harvard (Class of 2021)
Kye Shi is at Harvey Mudd.
Abijith was a 2014 USAPhO gold medalist, graduated from Harvard (Class of 2020) and is now a MIT Ph.D. student in Physics.
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Issues of fairness go well beyond school systems. Parents/family and genetics a significant influence as well.
Public K-12 system has its share of problems without question. But the idea that the public k-12 system is an utter failure is laughable paticularly using the lack of knowledge of extremely selective academic competitons as an example.
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Ok, utter failure was a little much. But thereās no reason that competitions and other activities associated with college admissions are not visible in everyday k-12 settings. I say this because I believe most teachers have graduated college- they should know these things.
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I donāt think anyone suggested these competitions determine the ābest of the bestā of all students other than those who participated. On the other hand, those advanced to the highest levels of these competitions are unquestionably among the very best in the subject areas. Many PhDs in the same subject areas wouldnāt be able to solve all these problems.
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If you think thereās a lack of awareness of academic competitions in the public K-12 system, wait till many of these schools do away with their gifted programs.
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Of course. But the K-12 school system should do a better job finding the talented students that are disadvantaged by their parentsā education and overall wellbeing.
I donāt think it is matter of just knowing about the competitions. Somebody has to do the extra effort to organize the students to participate in them. Iād guess that most teachers just donāt care enough to do that.
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Great point, INJParent- and not just exotic/high end competitions- plain vanilla enrichment opportunities. Our local public library sponsors a middle school writing contest-- so many categories, thereās really room for every kid who likes to write- poetry, fiction, opinion pieces, etc. Every year the winners (and it goes deep, down to multiple honorable mentions for unique subject matter, etc.) are dominated by the local private schools. No knock to them- their English teachers promote the competition, suggest to even the reluctant writers āmaybe you want to submit that great story you wrote about fishing with grandpaā.
The public schools? A couple of the teachers are champions, most are not, some donāt have the bandwidth for anything āextraā, some donāt want to single out talented kids at the expense of the ānon-talentedā, etc.
And you donāt need to be in a gifted program! Any kid who has written a short story or an essay or a poem or whatever can just send it in. The judges are just trying to promote literacy- really, this isnāt some dark plot to divert resources away from the mainstream towards the exceptional.
How hard is it to encourage public school kids to participate in a program at the local library?
Rant over. But INJ- agree, dismantling gifted programs is another blowā¦
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Strangely, weāre in MA and very, very few towns have any gifted programs. Nonetheless the state tops national education rankings annually (and is competitive internationally, unlike the US as a whole). Iāve always wondered about that.
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You obviously missed the point. Motivated kids with no resources find out about these programs. Any American kid can too. Not everyone across the world expects to be spoon-fed each enrichment opportunity. Apparently in many places, motivated kids search for these things despite enormous obstacles. So yes, I would hope colleges would reward that initiative and effort, rather than the typical suburban kid waiting to be pushed into some competition
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They donāt apply to many of the Ivy plus, which is a pretty arbitrary description to begin with. Duke, Chicago, great schools, but not going to get Olympiad winners or participants. Only Harvard out of the ivies is popular, and that would be for non-engineering majors. At the risk of generalizing, they will all apply to MIT or Cal Tech EA or Stanford /Harvard SCEA along with a flagship as a safety (which it is for all of them as well). In CA, these kids that donāt get into one of those four would pick over Berkeley over the Ivy plus. Very few people in CA think that any of the ivies are better than UCB for engineering or CS, especially that itās also in-state.
āBut isnāt med school admission widely dependent upon the MCAT?ā
Thereās more than the MCAT, typically med schools will first look at GPA, grades in math and science classes, especially chemistry, organic chemistry, which is where the weed out typically happens, meaning the students get a C or lower. There are just a lot of students interested in medicine when they start college and limited med school spots that weed out happens. They may not call it that at some places, but that is whatās going on.
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Most of the US is unaware of, and certainly doesnāt have access to, water polo, fencing, or other obscure sports which provide an admissions hook as well.
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Most teachers (and most college graduates) did not attend elite colleges where the most competitive academic (and other) contests and such are relatively well known among the students.
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I think these things (TAG, competitions, etc.) are grossly overrated. The people who do well, would have done well anyway had they not been exposed.
Then thereās the test we keep applying as validation of said competitions, acceptance to MIT. Graduate programs aside, thereās no evidence that attending MIT as an undergrad is really better than any other school. Itās a very small sample size, but my uncle went to a very pedestrian state school for engineering (for free) and then did his PhD at Stanford. My dad turned down the free school and did his BS/MS at MIT. To this day he maintains that his brothers undergraduate education was every bit as good as his.
Those national/international assessments (PISA, etc.) measure students in the middle of the distribution in a state or a nation. Gifted programs, on the other hand, affect students in the right tail of the distribution.
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