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[quote=Anonymous]I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here.  
[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 .... [/quote]
I collected and summarized data on six years of AMC contest results (back through 2005).  You seem to think that AMC contest results from 2000-05, and other local math contest results, are necessary to any review process.  I'm less convinced of the value, and I don't get paid to do this, so I'm not so interested in doing that.  I encourage you to find and summarize all that data.  If you do, I'm more than happy to incorporate it into the existing spreadsheets.

[quote]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 ....  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.  [/quote]
As for "patching together data," while I know my data method is far from perfect, the six years of data I've gathered covers approximately 90-100 students from Sidwell and another 40-50 from GDS.  This is fairly extensive, especially when compared to the anecdotal experience of two individual exchange students attending school ten years apart.  I'm also not clear what assumptions you think I'm making.  It's precisely to ground-truth many of the unsubstantiated claims and assumptions on DCUM that I started collecting data in the first place.  I am not touting GDS vs. Sidwell (or any other school), and my own advice to OP was that they're both great can't-miss schools.  My only reason for getting involved in this discussion of AMC results is that I perceived some PP (you?) as suggesting that Sidwell's AMC success is the product of a foreign-exchange program.  That claim is inconsistent with the data I reviewed.

I don't think we are making much progress here.  Maybe we can end by agreeing that if some parent is really concerned about comparing in detail the math programs at GDS and Sidwell, then she should have in-depth discussions with the schools themselves (and should not rely solely on cold internet data or anonymous DCUM claims)?[/quote]

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