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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Yes, you would think that was obvious and then you have the parents that keep responding with "I disagree, my genius got a 19 without any practice."  Remember, this all started with someone asking if a 6th grader getting a 10 was a good score or not and people trying to put it in perspective that level of math and practice are what really affect scores.  [/quote]

As someone who has coached math competition teams, I think both you and the PP are oversimplifying a bit.  Natural aptitude does matter, too.  I coached kids who were not otherwise receiving any outside math.  Some caught on very quickly and earned reasonably decent scores.  Others practiced just as much and didn't do very well.  Based on my school's results, a typical AAP 6th grader in no outside math tutoring and with no practice generally scores around a 6-8.  I don't think anyone at my school has ever scored 15+ who wasn't taking outside math classes or participating in a math club.

That being said, I agree more with you than the PP.  Kids do not make the AMC Honor roll without some sort of training, and parents who claim that their kid has done so are being disingenuous.  They might not specifically train for AMC, but they are doing AoPS, RSM, alcumus, or something like that.  Frequently, they are specifically training for mathcounts.  People seem to be too obsessed with "natural aptitude" and not enough with hard work, to the point that they're always distorting their child's accomplishments in a way that overinflates the kid's "natural ability" and disrespects all of the hard work the child put into winning.  [/quote]

So well said.  Thank you.[/quote]

I am the "it's not all about practice" poster. I highly doubt you'd get an 11 year old to self-study the AoPS sequence if they did not have natural ability.  He can do as little or as much math as he wants to, and he self-checks the solutions, too, and has been doing that for a good year. Could we push him further? Of course we could!! But I know MIT is probably not going to be happening for a white upper middle class boy, so I prefer for him to keep the joy in math and learning than to force-feed competition math to make sure that he gets into the absolutely best college he could possibly get into. [/quote]

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