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It is the result many Tiger Moms crave."</p>
<p>Well, goody for them, Beliavsky. Why should I be sympathetic to a twisted set of values?</p>
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<p>Newsflash? It might be helpful to actually use recent “news” and not rely on old wives tales about lower public salaries. Try this century for good measure, and check recent starting salaries between the two sectors. </p>
<p>The reasons for the early pensions have disappeared along the vanishing wealth of the country. They were part of a system of planned and accepted extortions. And, if there are any reasons left, the reality is that we simply cannot afford two types of workers’ benefits, unless we expect a private sector with septuagerians having to support hordes of 45 years old public service retirees. Or unless we are prepared to borrow our country into irrelevance to support incredibly stupid political decisions. </p>
<p>Oh well, better leave it at that, especially since the discussion about a new academy is totally in the realm of fantasy land.</p>
<p>Twenty and out generally is available only in occupations where the job description includes running TOWARD the sound of gunfire when asked. There are other places I’d reform first.</p>
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<p>I actually know and grown up with those working in the public sector with harsh political environments whether it’s military lifers, police officers, NYC public school teachers*, sanitation workers, and civil service workers dealing with the public at their worst. </p>
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<li>Many of them…especially those teaching in the worst public schools in the nation have to deal with violent threats and actions…such as being threatened with knives and yes…even guns. My old NYC neighborhood’s now closed mediocre crime-ridden zoned high school was almost literally a warzone with drug dealers dealing on school grounds and students/dealers/gangs packing knives and guns. One large part of that due to loopy educational activists insisting that separating out the violently disruptive or in the case of one client’s grandchild’s midwest public HS…even convicted felons from the general school population is “a violation of their educational rights.”</li>
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<p>What does this have to do with schweti?</p>
<p>Cobrat is, as usual, extrapolating his friends, relatives and cousins to the world.</p>
<p>Like we all aren’t aware of what goes on.</p>
<p>There won’t be loopy activists at schweti. Its all going to be about…stats.</p>
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<p>And as usual, Pizzagirl doesn’t seem to be realizing that in this instance, I’m trying to humanize the very people who are often negatively stereotyped by many of those in her occupational field/socio-economic class or those who seem to uncritically think public sector == bad zealots like Xiggi.</p>
<p>Cobrat. In humanizing so much about your perceptions, neighborhoods, issues, and and and, I sometimes feel you dehumanize the rest of us. We are not ignorant to these realities. Nor are the range of experiences we, our own families and friends, etc, have had, so utterly different than yours.</p>
<p>^Interesting. Here we were thinking USAMO has no value and people are getting admitted just for qualifying.</p>
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Maybe these are examples of the textureless math grinds, texaspg??</p>
<p>If I adored math and was really excited by it and wanted to spend most of my time in math related activities would I be a textureless math grind if I were truly passionate about it?</p>
<p>Why would anyone think that STEM types would like to live in concrete-block buildings?</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to feed any anti-Asian stereotypes. I only know of a single actual “tiger-mom,” and that is Amy Chua. No one I know acts remotely like that.</p>
<p>The reason that I picked USAMO and not any other national or international competition is this: USAMO is one of the few where a student can succeed without expensive resources. </p>
<p>The science fair winners usually have either worked in a university laboratory, or have spent money on their own. A local student was an Intel-semifinalist a while back. When I read the title of the project, I could immediately identify the scientist with whom the student worked, and I could trace the intellectual provenance of the project back to at least 1950. (xiggi has often posted about the advantages that students have if they are plugged into a university research lab.) Now, the student in question was also brilliant, as it happens, and I was very happy to see the recognition. However, working in a university lab was clearly an advantage. It is very hard for a student to conduct a research project at home while spending nothing on it.</p>
<p>The chemistry and physics olympiads require lab skills. These are hard to develop in a high school time frame if the school has poor or very infrequent labs.</p>
<p>I don’t know about the biology, computer science or informatics olympiads. I think the linguistics olympiad might be done by a student with a really good ear and access to the internet at a library–so maybe it is closer to the USAMO mold.</p>
<p>I will skip the “Mathematics, the Queen of the Sciences” argument, and the carry-over value of math skills into engineering and the physical sciences, although those arguments also hold.</p>
<p>lookingforward asked whom I would displace in order to admit the small number of students (10-15) whom I favor. I suggest displacing those who don’t try especially hard during the first semester, because the grades don’t go on the transcript (at MIT). This seems short-sighted, since later work tends to build on that semester. It also suggests that the student is externally motivated, rather than truly interested in the subjects. If a student is so burned out by high school that he/she cannot work in the first semester of college, it would be far better to take a gap year.</p>
<p>I also would favor displacing the student who was wandering around campus drugged and unclothed (this past fall, I think), unless he was a crime victim.</p>
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<p>Haha, I first read that quip as “public sector == bad zealots like Xiggi” since I tend to juxtapose the comparitive to the closest term. And, I could not come up for a reason to be called a “zealot” and a bad one to boot. </p>
<p>I am not sure how my uncritical thinking has resulted in elevating the public sector to the level of bad zealots - whatever that might mean. I just expressed the opinion that the lower salaries for the public sector is currently a myth, and that we cannot afford the exorbitant largesse and perennial abuses of the public sector benefits.</p>
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<p>I agree that math competitions are more accessible than science fairs. My kids will go to a good neighborhood public high school that does not groom science fair participants. But even for math, there are a series of math competitions, such as MOEMS for elementary school students, that students will likely not prepare for or participate in unless the parents hear about such things, value them, and can pay for them. We are doing so for our eldest, who is talented at math and participating in a “math club” outside of school.</p>
<p>Chinese-American parents commonly organize after-school and weekend programs where their children learn Mandarin and can also take extra math classes, often devoted to contest problems. There is a good supply of Chinese fathers who are mathematicians, physicists, or engineers and who can teach such classes at a high level. Perhaps, as someone else is sometimes accused of, I am extrapolating too much from my experience, but I think it is common for Chinese-American parents to organize extra schools for their kids and for math enrichment to be offered at them.</p>
<p>Youch. .
Are you Chinese-American, Bel?</p>
<p>“I didn’t mean to feed any anti-Asian stereotypes. I only know of a single actual “tiger-mom,” and that is Amy Chua. No one I know acts remotely like that.”</p>
<p>I do. One used to post on CC in fact. Some of you may remember Indian Parent. I know him in real life. <em>shudder</em> He was banned after a few short months.</p>
<p>USAMO is being used in this discussion under the assumption that it is a reliable single indicator of STEM talent. </p>
<p>The old model of admissions at MIT seemed to be that they found the smartest kids overall, and then assume these students will choose a wide variety of majors. In other words, if STEM talent can be directed in a number of different ways, they try to take the magnitude of the vector and then take everybody above a very high threshhold.</p>
<p>The assumption is that the “magnitude” for USAMO qualification is so high that you would only expect a few hundred people in the country to match it. I don’t mean that a few hundred qualify for USAMO; the number is more like 50-100 I think. What I mean is that you might expect only a few hundred people in the country to have the native intelligence and or work ethic to operate on that level in some area of STEM. </p>
<p>Whether this is a good assumption, that is, whether USAMO really measures “g” (g = intelligence), depends on how easy it is to study/drill your way to qualification. The Art of Problem Solving books have made it easier, but I am undecided how easy it has made it. When I was in high school, people who were very smart had trouble scoring a point on the AIME no matter how hard they tried to study for it. Some of these people ended up with straight “A’s” at MIT. So selection pressure would not in this case cause masses of people to train for USAMO, because it wouldn’t help anyway. </p>
<p>The notion of “auto-admit” is an artificial one. The point is that the philosophy being proposed is that the ultimate criterion for admission should be whether someone is one of the top 1500 applicants in terms of STEM ability (1500 is the admitted class per year at MIT). In the absence of USAMO, this could be established by holistic evaluation of concrete achievements/stats in concert with subjective evaluations like recs. For instance, a rec saying a kid was the smartest person they had seen at Thomas Jefferson High School would go a long way. </p>
<p>This philosophy is also applicable to non-STEM universities as well. Probably it is used somewhat. The whole question is how high they keep measuring the mythical ‘g’, and what weight you assign it. For instance, Harvard says they take the smartest 300 people they can find, their academic superstars. For these people, “g” is measured no matter how high it is; that is, extremely high “g” helps much more than merely high “g” evaluations. For the rest of admits, I suspect there are diminishing returns for demonstrations of intellect beyond high grades/stats. That is, everyone valedictorian/saledictorian and up is the same, and so the decisions are made to fill out the slate of ECs. Also, whoever had essays which resonated with the adcoms may also get the nod. </p>
<p>I’m not going to go into why admission philosophy matters at all. It’s been covered on this thread, and obviously not everyone agrees.</p>
<p>I just want to explain why I think the “USAMO auto-admit” argument is really not about this specific test, but signifies a larger philosophy that is not evenly necessarily about stats or contests.</p>