There are large populations that have no idea that these competitions exist. Even if they did hear about them, they have no support structure. This is just a classic example of overvaluing what I do and undervaluing what you do.
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Count me in as part of those large populations.
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All of that is fair. But benefits accrue in life as a function of both relative perform (relative to the resources you have) and absolute performance. As you get older, society stops rewarding you for potential and rewards you more and more for just actual performance. Likewise with university admissions. There are a blend of relative and absolute performance. In this context if the OP is complaining that Asian kids have it harder than, say, a white kid, with similar accomplishments, it has become very fashionable to dismiss the complaint outright. A lot of these Asian kids also come from very modest backgrounds.
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What is the accomplishment or performance to which you refer? A contest or a meaningful EC that benefits someone besides society?
I really know nothing about âOlypmiadsââŠis there something that demonstrates that excellence in an Olympiad shows a propensity to positively make a difference?
I really donât know.
There are two modes of thinking â a) knowledge for its own sake, and b) knowledge to serve society. Much of the knowledge that we really value now has come from the adherents of the first variety, incidentally. So letâs not diss them :-).
At least in math, people who have won IMO Golds are known to be extremely productive in their later lives from a research point of view.
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I am not dissing anyone. My limited point is whether there is any meaningful research to demonstrate that excellence in contests demonstrates future performance.
Today is the 52nd anniversary of the CSM explosion on Apollo 13. I guess NASA was filled with âtopâ math and science students. AFAIK, Apollo 13âs near disaster happened because a key part of the CSM had been mishandled.
Is this an indictment of excellent math/science student? Absolutely not. But what got Astronauts Lovell, Haise, and Swigert safely home was a COMBINATION of excellence in math/science etc AS WELL AS leadership at every level.
I am drawing a distinction between pure research and applied research h, and I am saying both are valuable.
And I am adding the concept that demonstrated leadership outside of research, pure or applied, or basic excellence in math/science is crucial.
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This is the most accurate statement in this entire thread.
I say this as someone who has known many USAMO winners, and has seen it go from being a near lock for admission to at least one HYPSM about 10 years ago to now merely being a plus factor. And during this time, the exam has only gotten harder, and so the ones getting the award today are stronger mathematically than those who won the award many years ago.
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I am not sure why we seem to value leadership so much. Andrew Wiles worked solitarily for some 10 years to prove Fermatâs last theorem. Would we have him show leadership and perform administrative duties and run the department? Or just prove Fermatâs last theorem? Or take a surgeon for instance. Everyone wants to be a leader. And we as a society lionize the leaders. Nobody wants to be a worker. Lopsided priorities and messaging.
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The problem is that people confuse âleaderâ and âleadershipâ with "has a leadership position. Wiles may not have had a leadership position, but he is definitely a leader in the field.
A leader is not a person who has the highest position, or the most power. Those only indicate that the person has a passion for being on charge, or having a prestigious position. Telling other people what to do, or making decisions that affect other people, does not make a person a leader.
Being a leader means that you are the person who people turn to when they want to know what to do or where to go. They are the people whose example everybody follows, because people trust that these leader know the way. They are the people who, when people are confused and running around, organize a system to help people find their way.
These are the people who, when they see that something must be done, will say, âcome on everybody, letâs do thisâ, and then lead by example.
For example Gonzales from Stoneman Douglas. They were the president of one club, and active in another. Yet after the shooting, they rose to lead an entire movement. Their position as president of the LGBTQ club was a leadership position. Their activism is leadership.
A person who determines the trend in research in a field is a leader. A person who starts a new art movement is a leader. Neither need to hold leadership positions in order to be a leader.
That being said, most of the search for âleadershipâ by colleges is bogus. âLeadershipâ is one of many ways to stand out, but âwe are looking for leadersâ sound better than âwe are looking for people who will gain money, fame, influence, and power, which will make us look good and help us with money, fame, influence, and powerâ.
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The kind of leadership you mention does not show up in a high school kid. At that point in life Andrew Wiles would have looked just like a nerdy kid with no discernible leadership skills in comparison with a SJW, activist kid. We need to encourage different kinds of skill sets, and admit them into college, and not push them out of the best colleges. We need these kids.
How many of the SJW kids have done anything earth shattering anyway? Have this been studied as has been suggested for competition kids up thread?
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Tippy-top math and science skills really are accomplishments that our society should value on the highest level. I do not like to see these kids labeled as not having âpersonalityâ or âleadership skillsâ because I feel that those judgments easily can be biased toward what society thinks a leader should âlook likeâ (both in a figurative sense and a literal sense. ) I agree with you that it is important to distinguish between âleadersâ and âthought leadersâ (also called individual experts, individual contributors, expertise leaders.) This second category is extremely important, but will not look like a âleaderâ, especially at a young age, to someone who doesnât know what to look for. Instead they may be perceived as introverted, nerdy, robotic, not well rounded and a lot of other stereotypes. These misconceptions can be compounded by racial stereotypes about personality.
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By the way, my own kids are arts and social justice type kids. Do I value what they bring to the world? I do! I just donât like the other type of kid being devalued.
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Schools want both types of kids at their universities. They are building a class. They are not going to take every Olympiad winner because they donât want to be one dimensional, as a CLASS. Parents and students need to remember that this isnât an individual decision for a school. They are looking at all kinds of bigger context factors to build and balance their incoming classes.
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Two of the universities with the strongest math programs were in the finals of a national competition last weekend. It was Harvard vs UChicago. The competition was Mock Trial. Universities love math wizzes, but it isnât everything.
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Presumably they werenât one dimensional ten years ago either, but at that time being an Olympiad winner was much more predictive of elite admissions than it is now. And itâs not like there are more Olympiad winners now each year compared to then. And as I said, because the exam keeps getting harder over time, the winners are even more accomplished than before.
So this is a conscious shift among the elite schools that now they less value this measure of math talent.
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Things get devalued when there is an abundance of them. The saying in engineering is âyou get what you measureâ. When there were fewer Olympiad winners being one carried a lot of weight. People noticed that an Olympiad win was a hook for certain schools, so more and more people started doing it*. More people, less special.
And, as with APs, the schools are trying to discourage a view that âthe one who studies the most for standardized tests winsâ.
My guess is that that is partly an equity thing (not everybody has access to the resources needed to participate), but I also hope that it is partly b/c they want to encourage adolescents to develop more of themselves than just their cramming skills. Either way, at some point, despite the fact that it is a genuine achievement, when enough people have it then other factors have to weigh in.
*For Olympiads they try to cap the number of winners at not more than half the participants. As the number of participants go up, so does the number of winners.
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The first really high level of recognition for the math contests is getting to USAMO/USAJMO. This has been restricted to about 500 students each year since 2006, split between the two (exact number varies slightly due to ties). USAMO is for students through 12th grade, and USAJMO is for students through 10th grade.
The specific definition for USAMO winners is the top 12 students nationwide (can vary slightly due to ties).
So to be clear, the number of USAMO winners does not increase each year, nor does the number that make USAMO/USAJMO.
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This definitely survives, whether itâs life or college admissions. My D did both, infact she shines better as a leader than a techer. Eventually sheâll figure that out herself. My say is the same, a combination of well roundedness is the way to go.