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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]From Reddit:

The hardest math class at my university is disproportionately legacies with several donor kids.
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It’s fascinating, really, and seems to defy all popular notions.

There’s a math class at my T5 school that’s supposed to be like the hardest undergraduate math class. It’s a cult all on its own, where the kids who are true math nerds and geniuses go to prove their skills basically, and they get shirts that say “I survived ____ class.” All the RSI kids, the ISEF and IMO kids, the kids who want to show that they’re the best at STEM, take this class.

Half the kids drop the class by the end because the crushing high-level, high-time commitment workload is designed to overwhelm and weed people out.

The fascinating thing is that this class is pretty small and has more legacies than most classes in the school. I have several friends in this class, and the amount of legacies is disproportionately high, with a few more donor kids than normal mixed in, too. The amount of wealth is that classroom is crazy considering it’s a class for the nerdiest, most driven and aggressive STEM kids, who I guess are largely legacy.

They are talking about Math55, purportedly the hardest undergraduate freshman math in the country.  There is such a huge prejudice against legacy, wealth, and privilege.  How do you think the parents achieved their status with a low IQ?[/quote]

Math 55 was gutted 10 years ago and replaced with a normal math class that just decided to gives 1 credit for taking 2 regular classes bundled together (probably to discourage DCUM-style students who want to tack up easy credits and graduate early),and segregates first years from other students.

The IMO kids are at MIT, not Harvard.

ISEF is pay to play, not a showcase of math talent.

I don't believe at all that that kid who isn't even in the class knows who the "donor kids" are.

Harvard's advanced math students don't care about "STEM". They care about math [/quote]
 the smartest math kids go to MIT.  Just look at the national math competitions.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/four-peat-mit-students-first-place-putnam-math-competition-0301
[/quote]
Just a note- no Putnam is not the “smartest math kids” but the smartest math competition kids. It seems trivial, but they are very different. 
There’s a ton of amazing talent at math by Princeton, Caltech, Berkeley and Uchicago, but very few are committing to Putnam. MIT had a student who connected a ton of people together that created a chain of IMO kids going to MIT (basically guaranteed admit) and destroying Putnam.[/quote]

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