@hebegebe at 290 made a comment regarding certain math testing and admission to Ivies. However it was not shared with us the race or gender of the USAMO students. What was it? It would be nice if it was 2 Latina females and 1 African American female. The tests are disfavored because they tend to discriminate against certain segments of our society and are generally not a good predictor of the future
âThe [USAMO] tests are disfavored because they tend to discriminate against certain segments of our society and are generally not a good predictor of the futureâ.
Who exactly are they âdisfavoredâ by? And how can a test of high level math problem solving ability discriminate against âcertain segments of societyâ? Itâs certainly true that some segments of society arenât sufficiently encouraged to participate, and might well find the culture of competition math to not be inclusive enough (like the culture of Silicon Valley), but thatâs nothing to do with the test itself.
There are plenty of other routes to become a math professor, but many IMO gold medal winners have had stellar math research careers. Those students are actively sought out by top colleges because the problem solving skills needed to do well in the IMO are very similar to the skills needed to make research breakthroughs, particularly in pure math.
Just a few examples amongst Fields Medal winners showing just how good a predictor IMO success is in reality.
Maryam Mirzakhani (âIn 1994, Mirzakhani achieved the gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong, scoring 41 out of 42 points. She was the first female Iranian student to do so.[18] The following year, in 1995, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad held in Canada.â) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani
Tim Gowers (âIn 1981 Gowers won the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiadâ) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers
Terence Tao (âTao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten; in 1986, 1987, and 1988, he won a bronze, silver, and gold medal. He remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiadâs history, winning the gold medal shortly after his thirteenth birthday.â) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao
@Twoin18 correlation and causation are not the same thing. Testing should not be used as justification for discrimination and that is really what this thread is about.
You may want to read some of Cathy OâNeilâs writings. One piece in particular is âmath contests kind of suckâ. Terrence Tao and other fields medalists responded. Terrence Tao said in essence math contests were fun but did little to make you good at solving research math problems.
The math tests you cite do not test ability to solve high level math problems unless your definition of high level math is everything below calculus.
Something needs to be done and quickly to make sure the nine speciality high schools in New York are open to everyone regardless of their race or gender
While math olympiad winners are certainly very smart and correspondingly have a better chance of having a good career in research or industry, itâs by no means a given. I know several people who used to be on a national IMO team of a European country. Several are researchers but not really Terrence Tao level. Some have serious mental health problems and/or struggle to find permanent positions. None have well-roundedness and âleadership qualitiesâ so prized by the top colleges.
The same people who believe certain subjects are just so offensive they shouldnât be discussed because there is no room for legitimate dispute, that certain issues transcend factual data so shouldnât be studied
The nine specialty high schools in New York are open to everyone regardless of their race or gender.
The opportunity is equal, the discussion is over whether we instead want guaranteed distribution of results or if there are other structural changes that might allow currently underrepresented students to have additional resources to encourage, assist, prepare them.
@SwimmingDad: âI note the fixation on middle school. If we havenât provided a proper early and elementary education - well by middle school the kids are far too behind. There is an enormous equity issue in education in NYC in the early grades.â
My husband has devised manipulatives and strategies for addressing the hurdle he says he has seen develop in kids at about 3rd grade. He has seen the need for such hands-on instruction, and had some good feedback (he taught for a while) while working with 3rd and 4th graders.
Speaking of Black children in large school systems only, there are studies I remember reading of years ago which link the development of a lowered expectation in the classroom for Black boys to a lower level of achievement, with comments and remarks by the classroom teachers linked to a causal (perceived) low-effort.
The studies have suggested that teacher perception of the Black child, with an emphasis on the boys, plays a great and sometimes unfortunate role in the reception, expectation, and outcome of the student.
My own experience tells me that young children are enormously able to absorb material, and that parents - even poor, single parents - are enormously encouraging of their kids in the early years. These parents sit with their kids and check and monitor homework completion, they meet with teachers regularly and are just as hopeful and engaged as any parent I now see as my own peer at this end of the parenting walk.
Many schools are likely overcrowded and that is a stress on everyone. But I daresay large classroom numbers are held to be the root cause of what any who might determine there is a problem in the early grades within the school system.
Am I wrong about this?
Teachers are still being taught to teach. Kids are still showing up everyday. Parents are still monitoring and engaged. Papers are still being lost between homework completion and turn-in, and kids are still being held accountable for that. (In such a scenario as the latter, it is fun to see parent and teacher partner on Team Student Success to help the kid turn the corner.)
Yes, there must be something wrong, somewhere. There is something wrong, somewhere.
ButâŠmanâŠ
âThe math tests you cite do not test ability to solve high level math problems unless your definition of high level math is everything below calculus.â
@collegedad13 What a bizarre way of thinking about math. Itâs perfectly possible to do a math PhD with no calculus in it at all. But regardless, AMC tests ability to solve difficult math problems, so what does âhigh levelâ even mean?
Cathy OâNeilâs criticism is very much aligned with the issues I mentioned about the competition environment not being encouraging and collaborative. But that doesnât make the test questions discriminatory.
And Iâm perplexed by her view that itâs bad for kids to find out that others are better than them at something. You find that out pretty quickly in school, sports and real life. And even in math, however good you are, there are always people who are way better. Read Hardyâs âA mathematicianâs apologyâ for an excellent example of how he felt in comparison to Ramanujan: https://www.math.ualberta.ca/mss/misc/A%20Mathematician%27s%20Apology.pdf
@yucca10 Iâve definitely seen a number of really talented mathematicians with mental health challenges. But Iâd disagree that their talents arenât sought out by top colleges, as @hebegebe indicated with the successes listed in post #290, and as pointed out explicitly here: âTrinity has the knack of attracting the majority of the UK IMO participants, with most students at the Easter camp going on to study maths as undergraduates at Trinityâ.
https://share.trin.cam.ac.uk/sites/public/Alumni/The_Fountain_Issue_19.pdf
Muriel Niederle, a full professor at Stanford has written about the harmful effects of these competitions. Also other famous people who are not enamored with these competitive math exams are Robert langlands, Gogo Shimura, Andrew Weil, John Tate, Stephen Smale, William Thurston, Godfrey Hardy and Qiaochu Yuan.
Niederle has a particularly interesting article on gender and competition that you may want to read.
I have never heard of an university where you could get a PhD in math without taking calculus
I think Twoin18 meant the PhD thesis itself need not have any calculus in it, and it could still be plenty deep. Mathematical logic, topology, and abstract algebra all occur to me offhand as areas where this would be possible, and the depth would go very far beyond the depth of several years worth of calculus and real and complex analysis.
The overall issue is a conundrum to me. On the one hand, equality of opportunity is absolutely essential, and the social circumstances in New York City offer nothing remotely like that, in fact.
On the other hand, once a student is admitted to Stuyvesant, say, the workload is rather intense, and the student has to be willing to go with that.
I think that if I were designing the test from scratch, I would have something like a two-week testing period, during which the applicants were taught something that none of them knew at the start, and where they had to be willing to work hard. This would reduce at least a bit of the prep advantage.
It also sounds to me as though standard deviations of the math and verbal section of the entrance exam are being used (either simply added or combined statistically), rather than just adding the percentiles. If stuck determining admissions in the current environment, I would do the latter. This would reduce the gaming advantage of knowing that one should work hardest on oneâs stronger area, counter-intuitively.
Well, I think there is a third issue, which is whether there can be changes to the admission criteria that would achieve more diversity and at the same time be an effective way to identify highly capable students, because the opportunity is NOT equal given the limitations of the single test model and the fact that the test itself can be gamed. More test prep is not the answer if the test itself is the problem.
Making changes to admission criteria (examples: multiple paths to admission; or changes to the way the test itself is weighed and considered; or a more holistic model that considers test scores in combination with grades, essays and/or teacher recommendations) could achieve more diversity without necessarily being a âguaranteedâ distribution (which suggests quotas).
You assumption that the âundeservingâ groups only have high test scores but their grades, essays and/or teacher recommendation are inferior to those of the âdeservingâ groups is not true. The end result will be the same. At best some of the undeserving will be replaced by different undeserving.
Only quota can help. Quota of 0 is the most effective. Like was practiced in the Soviet Union with the Jewish college admissions.
There is no such thing as a âdeservingâ group. There are students who want to attend the schools and are capable of doing the work if admitted; and student who arenât. A single data point system of admission (test only) is far more likely to exclude students in the capable group than a multiple-data-point system of admission.
And Iâm not assuming anything beyond the assumption that the students who are now sitting for the test are a self-selected group of high achievers.
But Iâd guess that if there was a form of testing that was not coachable --or if there was a prohibition on formal test prep and a way of tracking and excluding the students who had received such test prep-- then the outcomes would be different.
Personally, if I were designing a test-based system of admission, Iâd use the scores simply as a way of establishing the âcapableâ part to establish a larger pool of applicants, and then to a lottery-based selection from there. The cutoff score would be lower than the current cutoffs are, but still significantly high enough that the students coming in would all be capable. So, for example, this year the top 17.4% of test-takers got offers â the others were shut out. What if a lower cutoff created a pool of the top 25% of test-takers â and the ultimate decision was by lottery? Rather than a hierarchical organization of the exam schools, the lottery would function by ranked choice â so essentially oneâs lottery number combined with their individual preference would impact placement. Numerically that would increase a pool of prospective students from 4800 to 6880. What I donât know-- and would need to see data for â is what that pool would look like demographically. Iâd need to see current overall score distributions for each cohort to know if that would make a difference (I know that its not necessarily true that a cohort that is at the upper end of a test is in consistently at the upper end â for example, documented research shows that for the math SAT, males outperform females at the highest end, but that also males are disproportionately represented in the lowest end â so plotting different bell curves of scores for each cohort of interest would give a better sense of what test cutoffs would achieve optimum distributions).
But I do know that would eliminate the benefit of extensive test prep and a quest for higher upper tail end scores â because there would be no particular benefit of achieving a score above the cutoff. And this sort of system works fine in other contexts â there is a difference between identifying students who are capable of doing well academically in a certain environment and holding a competition.
I am going to use American Idol as an analogy.
There are contestants on there who didnât have formal training or experience much beyond singing in the shower but who blew everyone away with their amazing natural talent. Others claimed that they had invested a lot of money in singing lessons but was a meh at best performer. Others had training, experience and strong talent and got through.
Could schools come up with a way to find kids with strong natural academic talent who might not have had the resources for much prep? Because it seems like my second example of the mediocre but prepped person can succesed in the standardised testing competition when they really shouldnât.
The colleges probably thought that the SAT was such a way back in the days when most students did no test prep other than trying the sample questions in the booklet with the registration form. Of course, it was still based on proxy measures (e.g. English vocabulary as a proxy for doing a lot of reading) that some complained did not correlate well enough to actual academic talent by their standards, or had various biases that they did not like (e.g. regional, SES, race/ethnicity, urban/suburban/rural, etc.).
@calmom Your suggestion of the top 25% of test takers going into a lottery would not change the test prep culture because there will still be borderline candidates (what about students at the 26th percentile?). I am not sure your suggestion would change the percentages of each racial group much either. Like I said previously, I live in an area with one public school ranked higher nationally than Stuyvesant that only uses a lottery without any tests, grades, or rigor requirements and Asian American students are still a large portion of the student population (double the population of any other race in the school) when they make up a small minority of my countyâs population (My countyâs demographic is definitely trending to similar numbers to NYC besides having less Asian Americans overall). I agree with you that more parameters are better (standardized tests, grades, rigor, and how previous students from a particular middle school have performed at the high school with similar stats and rigor), but I always caution against subjective ones because human bias almost always come into play. But if I were speaking to a young underrepresented student who currently wanted to get into an exam school, I would tell them to forget about the politics and anything else besides putting in the work needed to reach your goals. Trying to engineer a system (at the high school level) to diversify the student population at exam schools is a false idol over the long haul, because the only permanent solution is to âfixâ the cultural and early childhood educational woes that exist in underrepresented communities.
Here is an article that was interesting (but behind the WSJ paywall) on some of the underrepresented students and whether or not to accept. I am pretty sure that I would have guided my children away from Stuyvesant if my kids had a similar opportunity, because I am a much bigger proponent of fit than prestige (I know I am in the minority on that topic). The black student who believes he is unlikely to attend Stuyvesant is already happy and obviously thriving at his current selective public school (grades 6-12) environment. That means more to me than any name prestige.
High Test Scores Earned Them Seats at Stuyvesant; a Tough Question Is Whether to Accept
Among the challenges of adding racial balance is the fear of isolation among some prospective students of color
Interesting to think that some consider working on something to be cheating. In the dinosaur days, I took the PSAT and received an average math score. I came from a working class family and needed a full scholarship to attend college. I got a book from the public library and studied the math section ( for hours, weeks and months). I raised my score by several hundred points and sailed into multiple Ivy acceptances with full scholarships. I ended up with three Ivy degrees ( at no cost due to high grades).
My eldest took standardized tests twice. In both cases, they were taken with zero prep. For the SSAT ( for private school placement), we looked the night before just to determine if wrong answers were counted against the score. Kiddo tested 99% and perfect score in math. On another test, a similar thing happened.
So does that mean that Iâm a cheater and my kid is fine? Does working hard on something you obviously donât know mean you are cheating. Or are people angry that some who need help have the means to get tutored and some actually have to go to the library for the guides. IMO, it makes no difference how you get a decent score. If you intend to go to these schools, you need the scores. We found out later, that it is very rare for kids going to private school not to study for the test. Many study for a year beforehand ( with and without tutors).
Using teacher recommendations and grades will fail because of the great incentive for the adults to cheat. Which is what has documentably happened very frequently.
I do like the idea of a lottery after establishing qualification. Maybe the city or state annual exams could be used, but I suspect that the same issue would occur. I still really think part of the solution has to be to make the nine schools less desirable by making other programs more desirable.