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Such an environment would be helpful, but there are books available to prepare for the AMC, and AOPS offers online courses.</p>
<p>Quote:
Out of the 30,000 high schools in this country, does anyone seriously believe that more than (say) 300 of them have ANY knowledge of USAMO, much less the ability to prep / coach students accordingly? </p>
<p>My son led his school’s math team in competition and still didn’t have access to AME/USAMO; Chicago uses its own separate system (CCML). Seems a little unfair to eliminate all of Chicago and other independent-minded regions, even if we are located in fly-over country. </p>
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<p>“This last year over 413,000 students in over 5,100 schools participated in the AMC Contests.”</p>
<p>quote from AMC webpage</p>
<p>Wasn’t one of the recent IMO gold medalists, Evan O’Dorney, homeschooled? And his father works for the civil service, so he’s probably not able to mentor his son in these math competitions.</p>
<p>I believe the original point was that MIT should use USAMO as an entrance qualifier. Given that knowledge of the program is far from universal and given that alternate competitions exist, such a “gimme” once again strongly favors the rich and connected.</p>
<p>The fact that such opportunities exist and can be discovered on the Internet is largely meaningless – the Internet is a huge place and one has to have an inkling of what one is looking for before beginning a search.</p>
<p>FYI:</p>
<p>Each year, there are about 100 seniors in the nation who have qualified for USAMO at least ONCE by the time they submit their college applications in December. That means that they needed to qualify for USAMO when they were freshmen, sophomores or juniors. Qualifying for USAMO at the 12th grade (announcement made in mid-April of senior year) is too late for college applications.</p>
<h1>1718 - yes, please, when you have the time. I am really really interested in the number after all the recent posts.</h1>
<p>This is from an older post on this thread</p>
<p>But I do wonder whether a young genius who would be thrown off his or her game by an admission disappointment has the right stuff. So what if MIT does reject the next Einstein? That will be some other school’s gain; we could all name more than a handful that would work just fine even for someone whose intelligence places him or her in the top one-hundredth of one percent"</p>
<p>One such school is called Aargau Cantonal School. This is where Einstein when to study after he failed to achieve the required score on the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic institute. Einstein was able to achieve his success after first being rejected from a school which was his top choice.</p>
<p>Sorry to interject-- I’m a high school senior, should I take the AMC 12? I’m fairly confident that I could qualify for AIME. I’ve never done math competitions before, but would it help for college admissions?</p>
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<p>Let us also note that Adolph Hitler chose to pursue an entirely different career after being rejected from art school. And Fidel Castro really just wanted to be a major league ball player.</p>
<p>For all the talk by HYPS etc. about diversity and evaluating students based on their educational environment and access to resources, my children who attend/ed those schools have met almost no one like themselves–middle/lower middle class students from a good, but not great, suburban high school. Their friends, roommates, and acquaintances are almost exclusively prep school kids or kids from the well-known magnets or rich publics like the ones mentioned on this thread. The stats suggest that students like my kids do indeed matriculate, but S and D report that all their college friends are from very affluent families. They tour Europe in the summers, their familiies maintain apartments in NYC for whenever they want to go clubbing and stay over a night or two, they have ski cottages in Vermont, beach homes in the Hamptons, vacation houses in Lake Tahoe and Jackson Hole. </p>
<p>I had thought D would have a slightly different experience, partly because she’s an athlete. I had assumed, incorrectly, that on her team there’d be greater socio-economic diversity than in the general university population. Not so. Of the new freshman teammates (and this is NOT a prep school sport either) two are from Harvard Westlake, one is from Phillips Andover, and others are from prep privates or affluent publics like Palos Verdes. </p>
<p>So while the internet has been a tremendous equalizer, it will take more time for information to percolate down. This is the very first year our high school is participating in even the ordinary type of math competition! Without CC, I wouldn’t have ever heard of Seimans, Intel, or USAMO.</p>
<p>So, some numbers, but first a disclaimer: The qualification standards for USAMO have been shifting in recent years, along with the number of students who are eligible to take the USAMO. The list of qualifiers for 2011 with their grade levels was not hard to find on the web. However, the USAMO individual scores (not by student name, just the numerical scores) were only available for 2008 and before. So the numbers need to be regarded as estimates, but I will “show my work,” so you can change assumptions and see how things turn out. </p>
<p>(I will break this into multiple posts so it doesn’t take up the whole page for a single post.)</p>
<p>In 2011, a total of 282 students qualified to take the USAMO and are listed in black on the web site. I am assuming that the small number listed in red (about a dozen) are non-citizens (and maybe also non-green card holders) and therefore ineligible to represent the US in international competition. Fourteen of group are Canadian, but I will include them in the numbers anyway.</p>
<p>To reflect a single-year’s cohort who qualified soon enough for their outcomes to affect admissions, I counted 102 USAMO qualifiers in 11th grade. There were 87 qualifiers below 11th grade, including a rather amazing 6th grader and ditto 5th grader.</p>
<p>I suggested that MIT should take all those who qualified before 12th grade and scored above 0 on the USAMO. So, I need to take into account how many students qualified before 11th grade, but then did not qualify in 11th grade. I suspect that this is a fairly unusual phenomenon, but could happen. So I estimated that perhaps 25% of those who qualified in some year before 11th grade did not qualify in 11th grade. There were 87 total qualifiers before 11th grade in 2011. Suppose this stays approximately constant, now that the qualification procedures have stabilized (for the time being). Then to the 102 11th graders, I should add an estimated 22 or so, who qualified when younger, but not in 11th grade. </p>
<p>This brings me to 124 students, going on to the next phase.</p>
<p>The USAMO is a 9-hour, 2-day exam (4.5 hours per day) with only 6 questions. The maximum score is 42. In 2008, of the 505 students who took the exam, 81 scored 0. (Tightening the qualification requirements may have reduced the fraction scoring 0 since, but I’m going with the data I have.) So an estimated 84% of the group scored some points. I will assume that the fraction of 11th graders (and below) scoring 0 is the same as the overall fraction, although it might be higher.</p>
<p>At this point, I have 104 students left in my MIT auto-admit group. But what fraction of those students apply to MIT? I’d guess that not all do. Some will apply REA/SCEA/ED elsewhere and get in. Suppose 60% apply to MIT (you can pick your own number). Now we have 63 students in the auto-admit group.</p>
<p>Of that number, how many are admitted under the existing policy? I’d guess 2/3, but you can fill in your own fraction here too. If the correct number is 2/3, we now have 21 students in my auto-admit group who would not have been admitted otherwise.</p>
<p>How many of these students should be disqualified based on issues of character or flunking everything but math? I’ll guess 3.</p>
<p>This leaves 18 students who would be auto-admits under my scheme, and aren’t admitted under existing policies. On top of that, I would guess that MIT’s yield of this group would probably be lower than the average MIT yield, reducing the projected additional enrollment, and allowing a little extra leeway in admitting them.</p>
<p>The 2011-2012 Common Data Set for MIT shows 1742 admitted students. I think they could take my extra 18, replacing a few people with the lower-range SAT M scores in the same demographic group(s).</p>
<p>Now, I am not saying that the people who scored points on the USAMO are invariably going to be the very top students at MIT, even in math (and indeed there is a post above indicating to the contrary), but I think my 18 belong in there with whole admitted group of 1742.</p>
<p>I understand that there is an extreme geographic concentration of USAMO qualifiers (even down to the high school level), so these students do come from educationally advantaged backgrounds–though they may not be especially economically advantaged. I grant that there are many students who become excellent mathematicians who never had the opportunity to participate in AMC/AIME/USAMO in high school, and probably there are additional excellent mathematicians who just aren’t into competition math. I think there’s room for them all among the 99% of MIT admits who are not in my group of additional auto-admits.</p>
<p>Finally–for collegealum314, LoremIpsum, alh, and the one or two other people who are still reading this (!):</p>
<p>I know it’s not possible to say, but I would guess that there are very few students with SAT M scores below 700 who even show up in the math classes that some USAMO participants are claimed to struggle with, in one of the posts above.</p>
<p>If necessary, I could raise the bar to auto-admit only those students scoring 4 or more on the USAMO (at 4, that’s still less than 10% of the possible points). This reduces the fraction of the group eligible for auto-admit to about 62.5% or so, rather than 84%. (Then also pull off those who do not apply to MIT, those who would have been admitted anyway, and those who kick cats.)</p>
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<p>My nephew plays a classic prep-school sport – the kind that few “average” high schools offer – at Princeton, and his roster is almost exclusively heavy-duty old-money prep schools such as the kind you mention above.</p>
<p>My kids seem to have all types from all over in their friendship groups. D reports quite a few particularly well-to-do internationals at her school, though they are fairly well known for being kind to well-to-do internationals.</p>
<p>1754: can you explain where you get the assumptions of 2/3 admitted and 3 disqualified on character? And, perhaps, that 100% applied? What other consideratons would you give kids who- for any imaginable reason- do not take these tests? </p>
<p>And, do you have any relationship with these competitions? Curious.</p>
<p>So where are all the middle class kids on financial aid hiding out? Maybe this will be the next set of data we’ll learn that colleges have been fudging to make themselves look generous and dedicated to equal opportunity. It seems like it’s pretty darn hard to get admitted if you’re from a typical American public school.</p>