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Reply to "AMC 8 math competition -- what is the point? (seriously asking, not detracting)"
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We have some pretty mathy people in our family, including a college math professor. We've talked about those competitions, and their consensus is that those competitions are fine to do if you like the idea of getting a score and getting ranked in a competition. That being said, they didn't think that the competitions are all that useful in expanding or enriching math knowledge. The emphasis seems to be on learning to do certain types of problems and doing them over and over again so that the kid recognizes a type of problem when he sees it and can basically plug in the numbers. The people I talked to about it advised us that the competitions are fine to enter but to not too caught up in them, because past a certain point, they felt that there were better uses of our kid's time. [/quote] Really? From my own experience with math competitions and the AMC series, I think the problems are great at separating the kids who truly understand the math from the kids who can perform well under classroom conditions, but don't really understand what they're doing. Generally, the problems are designed such that you can't just plug in numbers, or at least they make a point of having nuances to the problem that would lead one to plug in the wrong numbers. The highest scoring kids generally were the ones who were exceptionally bright at math, which is I'm sure why so many top college math programs want people's AMC/AIME scores for admissions. Granted, this was all 25 years ago, before test prep culture over-consumed everything. So, maybe it's different now. [/quote]
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