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[quote=Anonymous]No, Sam, I'm not happy to know they don't appear in the numbers you've collected.  That just shows the incompleteness of your data set.  Basically, if the AMC data is a "metric" for anything, it's for how many kids there typically are at a particular school who do well in math competitions.  As already pointed out, by focussing exclusively on one kind of competitions that not every school emphasizes (nationally administered individual tests vs. team-based university-run invitationals and local competitions (which are clearly relevant when you're comparing day schools in the area)), you miss a lot of this kind of activity.

Basically when you patch together data from the web and make assumptions without knowing much about the phenomena you're hoping to capture, you're likely to come up with numbers that are really pretty useless and, in some cases, downright misleading.

FWIW, Minhua won an AIME scholarship in 2001, was Sidwell's highest scorer at the 2000 UMd competition. When I searched his name I saw references in alumn pubs from both Sidwell and his HS in China to the fact that he was an exchange student.

Hengchu is one of only two kids from Sidwell who got honorable mention in the 2009 UMd competition.  And there's an article online describing his experience as a Sidwell exchange student.

Xiuyuan is one of 3 Sidwell kids receiving honorable mention in the 2008 UMd competition, Tobin was one of the others.

What I take away from this is that the PP who stated that some of the Sidwell kids who do best in these math competitions are Chinese exchange students knows what s/he is talking about (probably a parent familiar with local scene) and that you have a tendency to make assumptions/jump to conclusions that aren't warranted.  I see why PP's claim matters wrt the extent to which Sidwell's curriculum produces these results but, of course, the presence of such kids benefits any other mathlete at Sidwell and no one (except you) suggested that it might reflect badly on Sidwell to enroll kids from China that are math whizzes.

And re the creepiness of researching individual kids, you started it with references to Tobin and Fernandez and it's an artifact of the kind of statistics you've collected which, again, reflect more about the individuals than the schools.   Given that all we're talking about is successes/achievements that are publicized by schools and test sponsors, I think it's pretty harmless.  But I agree that if it comes down to this kind of discussion, you're not talking about institutions any more and it seems kind of pointless.  [/quote]

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