@collegedad13 I had to smile at your post. My very bright STEM daughter nearly failed math in 3rd and 4th grade because she wasn’t fast. She had all the concepts, way ahead of her grade, but she couldn’t do the stupid timed rote tests. At first, it really shook her confidence and made her believe that she was terrible at math. I worked hard to convince her that fast is not the same as talented. Luckily, it didn’t stop her love of math and science. Also, thankfully, she never got involved in these kinds of math competitions. I think it would have broken her. On the other hand, those are the type of problems she loves to wrestle with…slowly.
@SatchelSF I thought the point of my post was clear. LACs like Harvey Mudd and Swarthmore were among the top 10 in percent of undergrads that were Putman top scoring students, but had low total number because they have low total enrollment in their undergraduate class. That is fewer students are enrolling in top LACs like Mudd and Swarthmore because they have smaller student bodies than HYPSM…, not something specific to top math students avoiding such colleges.
If you only care about total number of Putman scholars instead of percentages, then one could make the argument that a noteworthy portion of top math students are choosing large public colleges over HYPSM… For example, the not east coast college with the most Putman top 1-184 and highest team ranking was not Caltech, Harvey Mudd, or Stanford – it was UCLA.
You say this like “1 in 5” is high! 80% is an extraordinary yield. And if you think about it, many of those 20% probably also got in to one of PYSM – which may have been their SCEA school as well!
@gallentjill when I asked my son’s middle school teacher about math contests, he said: “Outside of math contests, you only need to do math fast if you’re a Wall Street broker” (he used to be one).
No one is saying that everyone wants to go to Harvard, or Stanford, or any school, for that matter. However, some schools are more desirable than others. Their desirability can be measured by the percentage of applicants who choose them when other choices are available. That percentage is never 100% and there will be applicants who choose other schools for a variety of reasons (and often good reasons). This fact doesn’t imply the schools are equally desirable. The more desirable schools obviously have an edge in competing for the best applicants whereas the less desirable schools would have to do something extra to entice the best applicants. This is just common sense.
Sure, he went to Williams 40 years ago (and Willliams students used to appear once in a while on the Putnam leaderboards - the last Fellow being in 1985). A lot has changed.
It’s been noted that only a few Fields Medalists, for instance, have been Putnam Fellows (although many more will have placed top 15), but of course most Fields medalists did their undergraduate work overseas and could not have entered.
The landscape for mathematics has changed dramatically as well over the last 40 years, including the nature of the Putnam competition itself. Perhaps the change reflects an increasingly winner take all society.
Only time will tell, I guess. If people feel good about thinking that the next Terence Tao is lurking somewhere in the classrooms at Swarthmore or Amherst, fine.
My money is on MIT or Harvard (and a few others), so I’ll stand by my original statement that the best young mathematicians currently are not targeting LACs as a first choice. (And, no, Harvey Mudd is not an LAC for these purposes - I mean, really, you can’t even major in anything but a STEM field.)
LOL, your son’s teacher should have remained a broker. AIME - which is increasingly common for middle schoolers - is a 15 question test over three hours. The next stage in the series is USAMO - 6 problems over nine hours. A very few truly exceptional kids have taken the USAMO as young as 9 (I think) or 10, and plenty at 12 or 13. There is no time pressure.
MathCounts contests are a little different of course, and that’s great too that there are contests that favor speed over depth.
The world has changed quite a lot in mathematics, and it sounds like both parents and teachers have little understanding of what is happening.
I’m not sure if it was said but top math students aren’t choosing LACs because they are worried about running out of math classes at a school with no grad program in math. Top math kids today have already had math at such a high level before entering college that an LAC doesn’t have enough classes for them. I’m not sure when Princeton added MATH 216 Honors Analysis I but now they get enough Frosh that already have Real Analysis that they needed it because 215 wasn’t rigorous enough. It wasn’t long ago that kids that already had AP Calc BC or equivalent entering Princeton would take 201 - standard MVC with Engineering/Physics concentrators taking 203 - Honors MVC (half proof-based) and math concentrators taking 215 - Real Analysis. Now everything has moved up a level.
One thing people need to realize is that to the school, their goal is to be successful in obtaining their goals and objectives and not to be altruistic to one individual child. As long as the US Higher Education system continues to dominate the world, it isn’t going to get better. Schools will improve their processes that will continue to make it harder and harder for great academically credentialed only students to bust through the admissions barrier.
Is it fair to that 4.0 UW GPA, 1600 SAT, 36 ACT, NMF who got shut out from the CHYMPS? Maybe not, but their goal is not to be fair to 4.0 UW GPA, 1600 SAT, 36 ACT, NMF… Their job is to be the best University or College they can be by building the student body that helps them to get there. Since almost every top university in the dominant market in the world pretty much uses the same methods to be successful, I don’t see it changing to the Europe or Chinese method. If the Chinese method is so good, why do so many of their best students try to get into US institutions (that is an opinion, not sure if it is factual or if it could be proven).
The story about the great kid, all state athlete who had exceptional stats and appeared to be wooed by Yale. I don’t know what happened there. I would have thought he would have had a great shot based on the information we know. What we don’t know are the recommendations, the strength of the HS, or the essays. But, based on what I read, I would have done exactly what you did. As a side note though, I would have looked harder at the DIII level as well. You dissed Uchicago’s sports pretty hard, but right now they are #9 in the DIII Leerfield cup for the top DIII athletic program.
The point is that Universities don’t exist for individual students. They are in “business” to be the best university they can be using the criteria that they set. The method they choose to get their “raw material” will not change until they see a benefit in changing.
So how do you keep kids from being disappointed in this phenomenon? My first college bound child was really upset when he was differed and wait listed at GaTech and then differed at UMIch. To a point where once differed at these two great institutions they became “dead to him.” Both eventually accepted him, but he moved on and went to his #3, UMD, choice which he still believes is a lower level school for Computer Science. Why? It is a couple spots down on the ranking for CS. We as parents have to forget what life was like when we were HS students and be encouraging to our kids when they do get into very good schools. My son got his first B in a junior level, accelerated calculus class as a first semester college student. His thoughts were on how much of a failure he was. His next semester he actually got 2 B’s and the failure word began to stick. He just about switched majors his third semester when he thought he was failing a 400 level quant stats class, which he ended up getting his fourth B. I realized that I had caused this. My whole life was “look how smart you are” you are one of the “smartest kids I’ve ever known” and “surely the world is yours to take” type comments. I did not do a good job letting him know that he is loved for doing his best and you will not always be the smartest kid in the room. Most importantly, I’ve never told him that education is all about learning and not about getting a grade. If I could instill one thing about education in my kids it would be that concept. That when we study to learn something new, it is so much more rewarding than knowing the amount of work they need to do to get an A.
The situation is getting better with son #1 as he is really enjoying CS and is working on a couple great projects and was asked to work on a spectacular research opportunity this summer. He is beginning to see the light of studying to learn and understanding that getting a grade is not the most important thing. He is also realizing that his idea of a bad school was not a good definition.
@SatchelSF yeah, we were talking specifically about Mathcounts. AMC still requires thinking fairly fast.
I know several people who were winners of a USAMO-equivalent contest in another country and now live in the U.S. All of them are very smart, some of them are professional mathematicians, none are Fields medalists or famous enough to land a position in a top university. These are very different sets of skills.
There is no doubt that many strong students and their families agonize about whether to go ED or SCEA as the November early deadlines approach. This was an issue for my daughter as well, and she received conflicting advice from several sources. In the summer before her senior year, we didn’t visit any of the ED Ivies, but we did visit HYP as well as most of the top east coast LACs. AOs at both Amherst and Williams told me that ED does not confer any admissions advantage (the Amherst AO actually stated this very clearly to an entire info session we were attending). I also heard similar at the Harvard and Princeton info sessions. The standard explanation for the disparity between early and RD admit rates is that the pools are very different (treading lightly around the topic of hooks) and these schools in particular don’t care about demonstrated interest (obv not true for every school).
On the other hand, from what I hear, ED does confer an advantage at Penn, as well as at some (most?) LACs. I would suggest contacting AOs at each school and asking them directly.
In the event, my daughter chose to apply SCEA without expectation of an early admissions edge, and was accepted in the early round. She didn’t apply anywhere else as it was her true first choice. As I have mentioned elsewhere, being done with the application process early made it easier for her to enjoy her HS senior year and learn more about her future college and opportunities there—this is the real advantage of SCEA, in my opinion.
Although we are a FP family, my general impression is that SCEA schools are better at addressing need than ED schools, and in any case they do not restrict applicants from comparing offers received in the RD round. The knock on ED is that a student is locked in to whatever financial package the accepting school offers, forgoing the opportunity to compare competing offers in the spring and employ the resulting leverage to improve an offer from a school that may not have been generous up front. (In fact, iirc UChicago, when it added ED to its expanding menu of application options a couple years ago, cited a change in the timing of certain financial disclosures as the reason it was now able to include ED without favoring the rich—I don’t know enough about the particulars to say whether this explanation made any sense.) Of course, if the financial package accompanying the ED acceptance is not generous enough, the student’s family can decline it on affordability grounds, but this is the same as burning the early ticket.
@keikei I would guess the change UChicago is mentioning is that FAFSA is now available 10/1 and uses prior-prior.
^^ Yes, that sounds correct.
See below.
It sounds like your daughter has done just fine for herself, congratulations to her. But she really should have stuck with the competitions and sought out the ones that weren’t speed exercises. The only woman ever to have won the Fields Medal (basically the Nobel Prize of the math world, but even more rare), Maryam Mirzakhani, always described herself as an “extremely slow” mathematician. Nevertheless, she came up through the contest world, competing in the IMO for Iran as a teenager.
In fact, 8 out of the last 14 Fields Medalists were IMO contestants as teenagers, even the iconoclastic Perelman, who refused his medal because he didn’t care about awards - yep, even he was IMO for Russia in the early 1980s. Of course, not all great mathematicians were contest participants. But the idea that over the last two decades especially that contests are not sweeping up the vast majority of talented math students is crazy(and math is very much a young person’s game - most do their best work by their 20s).
This has been a little bit of a digression. My original statement that so many felt the need to challenge was that the overwhelming majority of the best young mathematicians in the country will not be targeting LACs. The Putnam provides some evidence of this, when you look at the extraordinary concentration of top students in there in a few schools (and the basic complete absence of the traditional LACs). Of course, not all brilliant young mathematicians are going to enter every contest or even the Putnam, but even those who eschew contests are by and large going to want to be around the professors and students who excel in the math world. Why target a place like Williams where Fields medalist McMullen studied 40 years ago when you can go and study with him right now at Harvard? (Insert any great research university with stellar math department in here - Berkeley, Princeton, UCLA, CMU, NYU Courant, etc.)
On this thread, I have been one of the people arguing that the idea that the very strongest students are only targeting the Ivy SCEA + Stanford is a crazy position. But not as crazy as the ideas that math contest results are not correlated with the strength of the students or that the very best STEM kids in the country are itching to apply to Amherst, Haverford, Williams, etc.
@foosondaughter you may think that ~ 80% yield is high but that was not what I was talking about. Harvard would like to see that yield at 100%. Again failing to see the perspective of the adcoms.
@SatchelSF I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the article I pasted earlier from Cathy Oneil about math contests being in essence awful. If not you should read it.
For starters math contests outside of being a complete waste of time IMO they are extremely gender biased as well as racist in application.
You may want to read about Tom Zhang. He lived in his car for awhile after getting his PHd. He also worked at a motel in Kentucky and at Subway. His BA was from Peking University and his PHd from Purdue. His work is some of the best in the world. He definitely goes in the category of working slowly. He didn’t take the Putnam or place in the IMO
@collegedad13 im in agreement with your point, but you kinda lost me when you said the tests were biased against certain genders and races. Could you elaborate on why theyre not just awful in general, but worse for (im assuming minorities and women?)
There was no competition math in China until 1980 and by then he was 25 years old. He came to US in his thirties and had to learn a new language and start everything from scratch. Obviously, a lot of what SatchlSF talked about would not be applicable in his situation.
@collegedad13 - Absolutely I read it, including all comments, especially those from Putnam Fellows and even one from the great Terence Tao, who remarked that the math involved in his extraordinary IMO appearances - what was he, 11 years old when he got a Bronze? - was not memorable, but that he cherished the opportunities that contests provided for the social aspects of being able to meet his “tribe” (a paraphrase, not an exact quote).
We can agree to disagree about the value of contests. No one has a monopoly on truth.
As for their being “racist” and “gender-biased” those are just buzzwords. There have been gold IMO medalists and Putnam Fellows from all over the world, and all different races, and it’s notable that some of the most impressive female contestants (like Mirzakhani, from Iran, and Olena Blumberg, from Ukraine who was IMO Gold and also a top-15 Putnam finisher) developed their talent in countries often labelled as anti-woman (including Iran just after it became a theocracy in 1979!). Artur Avila just recently won the Fields - I believe the first Latin American to do so - and he was IMO as well (Brazil). Racist, lol.
Of course there are different rates of representation in contest leaderboards by country of origin and gender. There has only ever been 1 female Fields Medalist. So what? What in the world makes you think that such extraordinary ability just happens to be distributed perfectly evenly among all the peoples of the world and by sex?
I know about Tom Zhang of course. Ramanujan never entered a contest either. (Or Gauss, unless perhaps you credit his deriving the general formula for summation at 10 years old or so under time pressure as a contest, lol).
None of this in any way argues against my original proposition that the very best young mathematicians are not targeting LACs (excluding Harvey Mudd because it is much more like CalTech than Bowdoin, e.g.).
@shafthalf if you look at the Putnam test results they are very skewed in favor of men and against men and minorities. There have been a number of articles of late written about the subject of bias in the math world.
I have attached here an editorial from the Harvard Crimson about the math department and it is a good starting point to answer your question
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/10/25/editorial-math-gender-gap/