Reply to When do AMC 8 results come out? Should I push my dd to do better next year?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s very hard to compete with Asian kids on AMCs who have been prepping since elementary school.

How many hours a week do they prep? 10? 20?

If my kid likes math I don’t want to kill it with drilling for competitions.[/quote]

Some prep that much.  Others are just good.  My kid maybe spends 3-5 hours per week on extracurricular math.  He just received his AIME score and will almost certainly qualify for JMO as a 9th grader.   [/quote]

My 7th grader loves math and did AMC 8 last yr and this year for fun. He has no interest in enrichment outside of school but does enjoy taking the test to challenge himself. He scored both equal to, and better than, a number of friends who prep many hours a week. So I’d say he’s “competing” just fine, although he’s really just doing it for himself and not to do better than anyone else. [/quote]

The funny part for my kid is that he backed away pretty significantly from contest prep and instead focused on a much deeper understanding of the math itself.  He only did maybe 2 AIME mocks and no AMC 10 mocks.  But, this is the year he got a 12 on AIME.  [/quote]

What does that look like? Courses? Books? Videos?

[b]The focus of AIME prep is, of course, much deeper understanding of the math itself, as that is what the AIME tests. [/b]

Each year, fewer than about 50 people in the entire USA score 12+ by 10th grade, so strategies for doing so are not very generalizable across the wider population. [/quote]
Yes, but many kids prep for AIME by just grinding AIME problems.  This can be somewhat helpful, because MAA sometimes recycles problems or has problems that use the same trick, but the value is pretty limited.

My kid instead focused on more olympiad style proofs and understanding a bunch of theorems that appear in olympiad level problems.  Geometry was a weakness, so he spent time with the Euclidean Geometry in Mathematical Olympiads book.  [/quote]

AIME problems come with a set of solutions, 3-5 proofs for each problem. 
It's not as organized as a text book, but it teaches those deep ideas, and seeing those multiple solutions for one problem gives a much deeper understanding than the 1 solution per problem you'll see in a book. And randomized problems give yla good spaced repetition experience.

So both are good.

If your kid did a lot of training in the past, then the difference this year may have come down to being more mentally mature and having had a year more of experience solving problems in general, improving fluency which is critical to a high speed test like AIME. [/quote]

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