Anonymous wrote:As a note to those who think calc only counts in STEM...if your kid is aiming for PE/Hedge funds, take MV if you can in high school. Finance admissions adore the math whizzes.
LOL
Absolutely no one in PE/Hedge funds thinks taking MV in high school makes you a math whiz. They are looking for USAJMO, USAMO and IMO.
You mean those silly competitions patents like you pay for for bragging rights?
LOL
If you make it to IMO, you are picking among HYPSM's and using the rest of T10s as safety. Silly competition indeed!!
For anyone interested in engineering, which was the OPs post, doing competition math with the goal of targeting top 10 is a complete waste of time because there’s little alignment with the math needed for those majors.
For a good understanding of science the time is better spend having a basic understanding of Multivariable, linear algebra and differential equations even at community college level because that will help tremendously in physics and chemistry.
If a math major, sure IMO will help, but that’s 6 students a year, even if you qualify for USAMO, it’s unlikely you’ll make it into top 10 colleges on the back of it alone, and to get to that level, competition math is your extracurricular starting from 6th grade if not earlier. That’s way too soon to lock in what a kid will do in the future.
That’s why math competition is a poor time investment. To be competitive, USAMO level you need to work hard 4-8 years. You can get the advanced math coursework, calculus to differential equations, in two years, and then you have time to do other things.
Whether or not math competitions are a good ROI is kind of nuanced. The amount of time needed to reach USAMO levels varies by student. Some get there with a couple years of working maybe 7 hours per week on competition math. Others grind 2-3 hours per day for many years and never manage to qualify for an olympiad. If a kid is passionate about pure math and proof writing, then it's a fine ROI. If they're so good that they can reach olympiad levels without too much time expenditure, it's a good ROI. If neither of those apply, the kid should invest their time in some other STEM activity that they love. Having your narrative be that you funneled inordinate amounts of time into competition math for somewhat middling results is not going to be especially compelling for T10 admissions officers.
The chances of qualifying to USAMO by practicing one hour a day over two years are zero. These kids usually qualify for AIME in middle school and start competition focused preparation way earlier than that. There’s a lot of math covered poorly in the regular curriculum like geometry or not covered at all like number theory. Not to mention that if you only qualify in 12th grade it won’t matter for college admissions. Many of these kids can’t take a heavy load of AP classes so their weighted GPA won’t be as impressive. Also, add to that the cheating scandals clouding the competition so you may be competing against contestants with an unfair advantage. Even then, maybe a third of USAMO qualifiers make it to a top tier school, the rest have second tier results.
So yeah, math competitions is a viable path for maybe 50-100 students out of the 7000 that take AIME, or the 100000 that take AMC.
Take multivariable and Statistics instead.
Fair. My kid almost made top 20% honors on usajmo as a 9th grader (got honorable mention) with only about an hour per day of practice, but he started competition math in 3rd grade. The kids I know who’ve made USAMO, USAJMO, or USAPhO still have a full array of AP courses and a few non STEM extracurriculars, but they all started competition math pretty young.
I also know several kids who’ve spent a ton of time grinding for competition math, and have not even come close to qualifying for an Olympiad. They would have been much better off doing something else with their time.
I don’t see how that’s a good thing. Basically you tutor your kid for over a decade, because must have done regular math starting in kindergarten. Probably he also plays violin or piano to complete the cliche.
Not sure that’s indicative of raw talent or that it’s more deserving for a top 10 college than the kid that took Multivariable but didn’t excel in competitions.
7 years is not “over a decade.” Elementary aged kids who do math competitions are taking CML or MOEMS, likely in a school math club. It’s hardly “tutoring.” Doing competition math and taking multivariable are not mutually exclusive. Most Olympiad level kids end up far beyond multivariable. My kid will be taking multivariable as well as linear algebra next year in 10th grade.
You started teaching your kid math earlier than 3rd grade when the competition math began, hence the “over a decade”.
Honestly, I don’t have an issue with it, it’s more when you chime in that colleges will see taking MV as a negative because the kid didn’t also have a high AIME score. And the nerve to say it’s helicopter parents pushing him into MV when you prep your own kid since kindergarten and you fit the helicopter parent definition to a t.
Don’t you see a bit of hypocrisy here?
This thread has taken a turn for the ridiculous, but at least I understand why you were so nasty in the last post. I'm not the PP who posted the crazy things about needing competition math and MV being bad without it. I was simply correcting your false notion that math olympiad level kids are cutting back on APs, get worse grades, and have no life outside of math. That is simply false for the kids I know at that level, including my kid. They are all taking plenty of APs, getting great grades, doing some ECs, and having a life outside of math. But they also started young. They also weren't singularly focused on USAMO at those ages, but instead on AMC 8, Mathcounts, and a lot of other contests along the way. Math is not a bad ROI for these kids, especially because they genuinely love the pure math. There's no need for you to malign these kids or their parents.
If a kid needed to spend hours per day on competition math to the detriment of everything else, then it's a bad ROI. For OP, it's a moot point, since OP's kid doesn't do competition math and would be too late to the party either way. If the school offers MV and other kids in the school are taking MV, then OP's kid would be best served by taking MV. Taking stats might look like a soft option in college admissions. MV might help OP's kid look like a stronger candidate. If the kid has to retake MV in college anyway, it's better to be part of the cohort who has already been introduced to the material than it is to be part of the cohort seeing it for the first time. One of my kids took MV in 12th. This kid had no interest whatsoever in competition math and no scores to report in their college applications. It was fine.
We all clear now?
Allow me to doubt your honesty, the statistical chances that two different parents with USAMO kids happen to be the same thread that wasn’t even about competition math are quite low. I’m not even sure why you brought up your kids competition results in this thread as it’s not relevant at all.
On many math related threads there are parents of math completion kids claiming that absent a good math competition score, colleges will doubt the math ability and talent or the accelerated curriculum etc. That’s simply not true, it’s a different kind of math, student profiles, interests, majors, and extracurriculars.
Anonymous wrote:A middle class or UMC white or Asian male needs MVC in high school for Princeton and MIT if they are not an athletic recruit or legacy/donor.
No. What they need to do for engineering at schools like MIT and Princeton is to be at the top of the math heap at their particular high school. And if that happens to be Calculus BC, that's totally fine. No college is expecting people to commute to a community college to take higher level math.
Unfortunately, less than 50 percent of American high schools even offer basic calculus. And students in those districts are frozen out from most engineering programs. Which is a waste of talent. And it's a very small percentage of high schools in America that even offer MV.
But, in the DC area, schools like Whitman and Langley will offer it. Plus the magnets. I have no idea how private school students in this area are even remotely competitive for engineering at the top universities.
My kid’s DMV private has MV, DiffEq and Linear Algebra and I believe other’s do as well.
And on the topic at hand, I think the classes students take paint a picture of their interests. For an engineering student, I would think MV would be more on target than Stats unless Stats was highly relevant/supportive of a specific EC.
And retaking a class in college isn’t the end of the world—just means they’ll probably have an easier time of it which I think would be very helpful for engineering.
Why not both? If they got a 5 in Calc BC, MVC is not a heavy lift (at least at the level they would teach in a year long class). The tricky bits are at the end (Stokes' theorem, Green's theorem, etc) and are a good foundation for Physics E&M.
AP Stats is easy math, tedious explanations but a good practical course.
OP again - would like to take both MV and AP Stats but no room for both in 12th grade schedule because of other graduation requirements and wanting to take an AP science which is a double period. This discussion has been helpful.
Interesting that the assumption of some PP's is that my kid is male...
Anonymous wrote:Taking MV might even be a negative in some cases.
If they see you have MV, that conveys a set of expectations to the AO. The kid has taken advanced math. Why? Are they interested in the subject and thus taken the advanced class or did their parents fast track math for perceived admission advantage? How did they use it?
If you have MV and you made USAJMO or USAMO, that tells the AO that you are interested in math, they can see a link. Maybe you pursued some other opportunities. Maybe you listed math as a major.
Absent these, you list MV and you did not even get a good score on AIME, they know you are meh in math.
Competition math is not as impressive for college admissions as it used to be. AIME means very little. MVC will be a far better investment for advanced courses in physics.
AIME means very little. But if you cannot even make a good score on AIME, it shows that you are just accelerated and not really strong in math.
MV shows you are accelerated. Then they ask how come, why? No AIME score? Assumption is probably a helicopter parent who pushed kid into MV. This is for T20 privates. Others don't give a hoot.
Nobody cares about the AIME score when applying to Engineering at MIT. Advanced coursework like MV does matter more.
MIT specifically requests AMC / AIME / USAJMO / USAMO scores on the application, and MIT admits are likely to have MV and high AMC / AIME scores
Anonymous wrote:OP again - would like to take both MV and AP Stats but no room for both in 12th grade schedule because of other graduation requirements and wanting to take an AP science which is a double period. This discussion has been helpful.
Interesting that the assumption of some PP's is that my kid is male...
I don't think being a girl is much of a boost these days for engineering. But anyway, under the circumstances, if applying for engineering, and the choice senior year of high school is between statistics and MV, the choice should be pretty obvious. MV if she want's to be competitive.
Anonymous wrote:OP again - would like to take both MV and AP Stats but no room for both in 12th grade schedule because of other graduation requirements and wanting to take an AP science which is a double period. This discussion has been helpful.
Interesting that the assumption of some PP's is that my kid is male...
I don't think being a girl is much of a boost these days for engineering. But anyway, under the circumstances, if applying for engineering, and the choice senior year of high school is between statistics and MV, the choice should be pretty obvious. MV if she want's to be competitive.
Will still be competitive if she takes neither. Just have a great well rounded application. MV or stats (as long as you have AB and BC and did well) is not gonna make or break you.
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