<p>
</p>
<p>But MIT is already doing this. Look at the top Putnam Scorers - for the past five years at least at least a third of the top 100 are MIT students! And no offense to USAMO qualifiers (I wasn’t even able to make AIME my senior year), but USAMO qualification by itself does not make one a “standout” in mathematics. At least not in the context of MIT admissions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You wouldn’t know whether a USAMO qualifier than every random student with otherwise great qualifications (acing college math classes at UCLA.) I’m just saying there aren’t 1500 such people. (In fact, I was a lot like your example who went to Caltech.)</p>
<p>It’s just based on my observation. The USAMO qualifiers I knew were head and shoulders above the people I knew who graduated phi beta kappa in engineering at MIT (which is like the top 5% of MIT.) </p>
<p>It’s possible that, with the advent of The Art of Problem Solving and other well-publicized ways to study for contest math, that these tests are less about creativity than they used to be. My observations are based on the mid-90’s, and I’m guessing things haven’t changed too much in terms of the quality of people qualifying for USAMO.</p>
<p>
Can someone translate. I’m from the hippie days and all, so I’m unclear what this sentence means.</p>
<p>In our area, the kids who do the best on these math contests have private math coaches (yes this is common) or attend math circles. If you just love math and do a bit on the side you are NOT going to be able to keep up with these kids. I’m not sure they are the MOST talented. ( I’m mostly talking up to the AIME here), they may be actually better, but it’s hard to tell whether the success is from just talent or talent and a lot of practice.</p>
<p>My son at one point could keep up with these kids, but since he gave up practicing for these contests in HS, they just blow him away. (He does qualify for AIME, but doesn’t usually score very high). Have they gotten better…their brains more developed by all this practice, or is this sort of thing just something you need to do a lot of (put in the hours) to do well?</p>
<p>I was thinking the same thing as you bluebayou. It’s hard for me to believe that one math contest can absolutely identify the top math students in the entire United States. The overwhelming majority (and then some) of high school students have never heard of USAMO and, hate to say it, but have never heard of MIT either). I have to believe there are 1000’s of students, given the same opportunities, that could easliy compete at USAMO. It seems that MIT also agrees with this.</p>
<p>Collegealum–I am certain there are many engineering students from other top (any maybe even from some no name) universities who are head and shoulders above the top engineering students at MIT. It would be impossible for MIT to find them all or for all of them to even want to go to MIT.</p>
<p>I don’t know what its like elsewhere but here in Florida there has been an explosion of AP test taking in public schools. Why? Because the State decided to grade the schools in part based on the number of ap tests taken. For some unknown reason they didn’t care what the kids scored which was mainly 1’s and 2’s. This year they had the brilliant idea to actually grade schools based on how well their students do on the ap tests.</p>
<p>Regardless, Pizza I think what you are saying just supports what Mr. Shelby wrote. Whether you agree with what elite schools are doing with college admissions or not, the fact is that merit and academic excellence do not play the role they once did. The fact that they are very open in saying that they do not care about or want to know what your AP scores are is just one more example of that.</p>
<p>
I would say that this exam might not identify all the top students primarily because, as many have pointed out, not all students take this exam.</p>
<p>However, I think it might be safe to say that those students who score very highly on the AIME (at this USAMO level) are, or have the potential to be, among the top math students in the country. I am a workmanlike math person, I’ve taken all the math necessary for undergrad physics and engineering degrees, and those AIME problems can be really, really hard AFAIC. The AMC tests aren’t bad, but once you get into the AIME test they seem pretty tough to me, and although I’m sure there are probably ways to coach for it I think a kid still has to be very sharp to do well.</p>
<p>But I’m also pretty sure MIT is well aware of all of this and takes all of this into account, again, according to what they see as their university mission and how best to achieve it.</p>
<p>I have never said that the USAMO can identify all of the top math students in the U.S., and I think if you read my recent posts, I have made that point reasonably clearly. collegealum314 has said essentially the same thing as I have said.</p>
<p>I think that a strong showing on the USAMO is sufficient to demonstrate math talent, but not necessary. It can identify <em>some</em> of the top math students in the U.S. The number identified through USAMO is small enough that there is plenty of room for MIT to take all of them (who want to go there), and then to take roughly an equal number of students who look like possible top math students, without filling their quota for math majors.</p>
<p>People with specialized instruction do have an advantage on the AIME, for sure (and the MAA has officially taken notice of that). I hadn’t considered whether the Art of Problem Solving site, while helping to level the playing field, was also making it possible to do well without being as creative–will have to think about that.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I don’t think that specialized instruction in itself will make a USAMO qualifier–will check whether Tiger Mom’s older daughter made USAMO, but I doubt it.</p>
<p>To soomoo–it is my opinion that putting effort into any area will indeed re-shape one’s brain, to make it better in that area, and at any age. This goes against conventional wisdom, but I do think it’s true.</p>
<p>To limabeans01, #1485: Many engineering students who are head and shoulders above the top engineering students at MIT? How do you define “many,” and where is your cut-line for “top” at MIT?</p>
<p>Re: being a pilot as an EC for MIT. It does seem to be regarded as a good one, actually. I think Pete Conrad (the astronaut) managed to get flying lessons either free or deeply discounted, after hanging around an airport (even though he came from a relatively wealthy family). For obvious reasons, I don’t think this strategy will work now! For what it’s worth, my dad has always said that it’s easier to fly a plane than to drive a car, as long as no one is shooting at you.</p>
<p>
Prepare for a tangent-
I got my license as a kid in the Air Explorer’s (mid 70s). We had a guy donate his instruction time to our post, and I worked at the airport as a hanger boy/ line boy for flight time. My parents sprung for fuel. I don’t know if you can still do this.</p>
<p>"The point of this being that AMC and the other qualifiers are not universally available, and it’s ridiculous for a school like MIT to decide that obviously whoever hasn’t taken the AMC and made it to USAMO is a complete dummy unworthy of an elite education. "</p>
<p>The great thing is – MIT (etc) already get it. They know that these contests, etc are highly skewed towards upper middle class and very selected geographic areas. That’s why they deliberately don’t admit all these winners, because it would give them more of the same old same old. They’re doing the right thing. It’s those who are already privileged who think that it’s “not fair” and “MIT owes it to society” to automatically admit all these kids.</p>
<p>I don’t think we have information on the socioeconomic status of the USAMO qualifiers.</p>
<p>Oh sm74, give it up. You keep pretending that there was some kind of golden age when Ivy admission was all about academics. You must be completely unaware that until relatively recently, Ivy admission had nothing to do with academic merit and had everything to do with headmasters, handshakes and rewarding the (usually WASP) social families. Ivy admissions today has far more to do with academic merit than at ANY time in the past. I think you’re sadly misinformed on the history of the Ivies.</p>
<p>alh #1472, asked why I thought that admissions decisions are made as they are, concerning “top” students.</p>
<p>Well, in truth, I don’t know.</p>
<p>I think it is a good idea to try to level the playing field (which is ridiculously uneven), by identifying students with high potential, as opposed to simply admitting those with the strongest resumes of accomplishment to date. People of good will can disagree about the best ways to level the playing field and how much counter-weighting should be done. There can also be disagreement about how fast various students will grow.</p>
<p>Earlier in CC history, tokenadult started a thread in the Parents Forum by tokenadult, asking how it happens that top scorers do not get into top schools (search for “top scorers” in the thread title, and just look for the longest one).</p>
<p>There I posted a few ideas that I labeled as “crackpot.” They are, but there may be an element of truth in them. Condensing to just the theories, and none of my commentary, here are the leading ones:</p>
<p>Theory #1: Rising time-costs of EC mediocrity (making it more time-consuming to stand out)
Theory #2: Low cost (to admissions personnel) of rejections that later seem erroneous
Theory #3: Potential negative stereotyping of “top scorers”
Theory #4: Limitations of opportunity, due to changed perceptions of school-district liability (Students can’t work in a lab alone, and a lot of lab work has been removed from the curriculum.)
Theory # 5: Insufficient difficulty of the SAT
Theory #6: The uncertainty principle
(See user name). The product of the length of the application and the likelihood of error in the admissions decision is at least h-bar divided by 2–or actually, much larger.
For practical reasons, the colleges have to limit the application length. As pointed out on this thread, it’s really the application and not the student that’s being assessed.</p>
<p>After that, I wrote:
I have other crack-pot theories (the end of the cold war is one), but I’ll spare the forum!</p>
<p>To elaborate on that: I am guessing that while the cold war was going on, there was a sense that the country needed to develop the scientific and engineering talents of people who might play a significant role in national defense. There was certainly a lot of interest in improving the math and science curricula in the schools, in response to Sputnik. (You can view this as misguided, or not–that would require a very long discussion and a lot of historical research.)</p>
<p>Aside from the Sputnik issue, I think that the success of Drs. Salk and then Sabin in essentially eliminating polio in the U.S. had a lot of impact. Polio was a dread disease, and it seemed to strike almost at random. Dick Zare once commented that he had not been permitted to go swimming nor to eat fruit during the summers, when he was growing up, due to his mother’s fear that he would contract polio.</p>
<p>In any event, I suspect that there might have been more of a sense forty or fifty years ago that the entire country would benefit from the work of very well-educated (and very smart) scientists and engineers. So that made selecting students–at least at MIT–more a question of purely academic qualification (with the acknowledged biases that go into that).</p>
<p>I think that now the discussion focuses somewhat more on the benefits to the individual and somewhat less on the potential benefits to the country, as indicated (for example) by some of the comments on this thread.</p>
<p>Last year, my hs senior son took an old AMC12 test at home for practice, but he used a calculator just to see the difference. He finished it in half the allotted time with no errors. The point here is that proficiency on AMC, certainly, and to some degree on the AIME, has little to do with math genius or creativity and more to do with repetition and drills - becoming a human calculator, if you will. That’s why students who start young, learn the vocabulary and so forth and put hours into practice do the best on these tests. At the Olympiad level, certainly, there are highly talented math students, but I wonder if the contest process really finds most or even a fraction of the best young mathematicians. I think that there may be many talented mathematicians out there who are not identified in high school through the contest process, because the process does not appeal to many students - they find it repetitive, pointless, and boring. My guess is that MIT and Caltech get this too.</p>
<p>There are roughly 4.5 million 18 year olds in the United States. What percent participate in USAMO or AMC?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>you should have quoted
It has a different meaning.</p>
<p>Anyway, collegealum stated the top would be the top 5%. I am just guessing that out of 4.5 million 18 year olds, the 1000 that attend MIT cannot possibly be unbeatable. There are too many variables. I would be surprised in fact if there were no tippy top engineering students from Stanford, Cal Tech, Berkeley,Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, just to name a few, that could not compete academically with a top MIT grad.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>True. But…</p>
<p>We know with absolute certainty that SAT/ACT scores are correlated with family income.</p>
<p>We know with absolute certainty that participation in Intel science competition is correlated with family income.</p>
<p>We know with absolute certainty that the high school advisors for USAMO in California represent wealthy districts/schools. (I know nothing about the other states.)</p>
<p>Since this is a discussion about math, logic eventually would indicate…</p>