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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In my experience from poking around Reddit College boards for a few years, it's doesn't seem like Ivies get too excited about competitive math kids or super advanced math kids.  They can make math majors out of most kids who matriculate at their school.  I have a daughter at an Ivy who is double majoring in math and many kids in the math department came to school having only taken Calc AB in high school (because this is all many high schools offer) and so they started with Calculus II (or even Calc I) in college and now 2 years later are doing very well as a math major.

Colleges really only need the math geniuses at the PhD level and they will import an entire class of these from other institutions when the time comes. They really don't need their own undergrads to be math whizzes.  Colleges admit kids who are going to add to the campus and community.  Doing math 3 years up doesn't really do this. [/quote]

Tough love. Math is the easiest thing to excel at because it doesn't require special connections (except money for math camp, but colleges know enough to not be impressed by that). But it's also the least interesting thing because no one needs a human calculator, and math research (not "I wrote an expository paper at camp") is the hardest subject to do real esearch in. So there are a few superstars who do something interesting in math research in HS and go to Harvard or MIT, then the obvious tippy top HS math people who go to MIT, and then a lot of people who are stellar at math but that's just a checkbox for "likes math" and still needs the usual GPA, EC, leadership well-rounded stuff that math specialists are usually not competitive at due to brain type. [/quote]

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