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When I was a kid I knew a lot of other kids in some sort of "advanced math" track. I was going to math camps, attending the international math olympiad, that so

by lacker 7y ago

When I was a kid I knew a lot of other kids in some sort of "advanced math" track. I was going to math camps, attending the international math olympiad, that sort of thing, so I met a lot of others in a similar situation. One kid was enrolled in college at 13, and some others were in a similar situation. Whereas another cohort of kids basically just cruised through or skipped their high school math classes, learned advanced math quasi-independently in parallel, and stayed socially integrated with their classmates. I don't know so much about electrical engineering, which is the subject in this article. But for mathematics, I don't think it's a great idea to advance to college super early. One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. The people who went, for example, to Ohio State University while they were young, and took their undergrad math classes, generally didn't describe them as very intellectually interesting. You also just miss the social interactions of having a peer group near your own age. But I think those are more apparent to people. The problem is that you think you're exchanging some social interaction for a great intellectual experience, and then you don't even really get a great intellectual experience. My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam. In my experience, teachers who are hesitant to break the rules of the system are more willing to believe the "proof" of an AP exam, and a smart kid can ace an AP exam in a subject they know nothing about with a little bit of cramming. It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school. For math specifically, you can usually just start taking graduate math courses during your freshman year at university. That way, you get the intellectual stimulation of grad school, but the social stimulation of an undergrad program. And if you change your mind and decide you want a career in something other than mathematics, you have plenty of time.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
I was a pretty mediocre student in high school (as in, I didn’t get into Duke, people like you would consider me a failure etc), what would you say was the biggest difference between the precocious crowd you describe and everyone else? Do you think it’d just inherent? I did community college in high school so I’d say it’s better to eliminate the “boring” general ed classes first but that’s just my experience.
chubot 7y ago
These days it seems like a reasonable alternative for a gifted high school stduent to take online math classes. So they can still socialize with their peers but take some advantage of their advanced ability. I know online classes don't have a great record, but this is probably one of the instances where it makes the most sense. The student is presumably motivated, and if they're not, then it's not a big deal. They're already ahead and can do something else at their regular school.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  I was in gifted programs until high school, whereupon I went to a magnet school that had lots of opportunities for advanced math people (you could take calculus freshman year and not run out of math courses). The schools (both private and public) broke up the students into effectively the "fast" math group and the "slow" math group. And very often, there was the "me" group, where I was working at my own pace and quickly burning through the math books. As you say, students who have that aptitude for math tend to have a sufficient motivation to do the self-study, especially if the material can be presented as some sort of challenge (how fast can you get through this textbook?).
nostrademons 7y ago
> One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. That wasn't my experience. (I went to a top liberal arts college - it didn't give minors, but I took enough math courses that it would've been a minor at other schools.) In my experience, post-calculus college-level math is qualitatively different from high-school math in focusing on proofs and abstractions over problem-solving, techniques & algorithms. I had an intuitive sense for high-school math. College math kicked my ass, because I was asked to prove everything rigorously, and the proofs just kept coming, dozens of them per homework assignment. That required a very different way of thinking than high-school math did: you needed to remember this large body of theorems and combine them in creative ways to derive new proofs, you couldn't just memorize recipes and techniques that will get you the answer. I found that physics was more like the continuation of high-school math, except that then your courses had all this lab work and experiment design and fundamental physical principles. One of my friends (a math/physics double major) described it like this: "In physics vectors are objects that live in a vector space, while in math a vector space is a set of axioms from which the concept of a vector and rules for manipulating them naturally fall out." Edit: hmm, just looked at the username. I know you, and I also know you're better at math than I am. I'm curious just what kind of math you did in high school and what you did in college where the college math was no harder than high school. Either your high school had some really great math courses or your college had some pretty shitty ones. Maybe it's just where we went to school.
- fyp 7y ago
  If he was doing olympiads in high school, he was already doing proof-based math then. I think Terry Tao describes the stages of mathematical maturity really well: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
- lacker 7y ago
  Well, I should be more specific. I think once you get into the sort of number theory where you prove things about modular arithmetic, and the sort of analysis where you are talking about abstract spaces rather than n dimensions of real numbers, those courses are notably different from high school courses, and all the focus on proofs is intellectually stimulating to advanced kids. The courses which are typically boring for advanced kids are calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability, statistics, combinatorics. Most of an undergrad math degree usually falls into this bucket but it really varies by university. Also, there’s a big difference between colleges. Not because of the curriculum as much as the other students who will set the pace of the class. Often the same kid who could attend Ohio State at 14 could also attend Princeton at 18, and that makes a difference even if the course titles are the same.
DaniFong 7y ago
How would taking the AP exam in high school be appropriate in this case? That would be the equivalent of taking an AP exam in math 5 years after graduating EE in college. People are going to have different opinions on whether or not it's worth a 13 year sentence of boredom in order to socialize with age peers, but I really question whether the default high school experience is, for most people, a good thing. Activities like sports and music seem like a vastly better return on effort for advanced kids, with more positive values in the milieu than the typical high school popularity contest. Ultimately, the world is defined by a vast diversity in ages, backgrounds, and capabilities. If you want to do something in that world, and you're really young, you'll first have to get used to being the youngest person in the room. Throw all of this argument out the window if the student actually enjoys school, of course.
- lacker 7y ago
  Taking the AP exam in high school is just a tactic. A situation like: Student: Man I don't want to take this boring mandatory calculus class. Teacher: You have to. Student: But I already know all this stuff! Teacher: Mmmmm, well that's just like your opinion, man. Student: What if I ace the AP exam? Teacher: OK, then I would believe you. In my experience it's pretty rare for all of high school to be boring. You probably haven't read the particular works they're discussing in English class, you probably haven't read about the particular time period they're discussing in history. And even if you have, there's plenty more you can learn about those things. The most common area to be bored by is math, because you can pick that all up yourself relatively easily.
  - DaniFong 7y ago
    I suppose it depends on when this all kicks in. In my case, in kindergarden I was tested into 11th grade; in response I was placed into 1st grade. Which was fine, honestly, I spent a lot of time drawing and so forth, but things got really unpleasant and pointless in 7th grade, so I dropped out, and dropped into college. I'm reading a lot of people complaining about the damage to one's social prospects, and surprisingly few calling out what I experienced: school was minimally useful, the social environment was pretty toxic, and in my case, the teacher was tyrannical. University was so much better! For highly motivated and gifted students, early university can be a great option. It is important to place it on a larger arc of one's own journey of learning, development, and self discovery, however, that must continue for as long as one keeps growing. As an important aside, girls and boys have approximately equal interests in science math and technology earlier on; for girls this changes pretty severely in middle school and high school. I'm sure there a very large social component to this, parents would do well to inoculate against it by finding alternative environments, and university is certainly one.
geoffreyhale 7y ago
The key takeaway to me here is that if you are gifted you should go to a top-tier school, not necessarily wait.
- lacker 7y ago
  The top-tier schools usually don't accept super-young students, though. What usually happens is, a second-tier school will accept a super-young student because they see no downside. The top-tier schools will tell you, just wait and apply again when you are older. I don't know specifically about the Eindhoven University of Technology but it seems like roughly the 100th best school in Europe, which in the US would be like going to Saint Louis University. A fine school I'm sure, but if you can graduate there when you're 9 then maybe you should just instead go to Harvard when you're 18.
  - DaniFong 7y ago
    Lots of people do the equivalent of this, early college classes and then they go to a top tier school for undergrad. I think Reid Barton did this. There are caveats, I know someone who finished the CS curriculum in high school, when he got to Berkeley the only credits he had left for his CS degree were non-CS, which bored him, so he just dropped out and started a startup. Seems fine now, as far as that goes, aside from the exodus from the bay area that the housing situation has forced on many of us...
foobaw 7y ago
Most people that attend IMO are prodigies but generally, sociable. I met many of them and they just love math.
- andbberger 7y ago
  > Most people that attend IMO are prodigies Can we all agree to never use that word? Actual prodigies are measure zero in the general population. Terry Tao is a prodigy. The rest of us are just normal schmucks. Prodigy suggests that talent comes naturally to and is dismissive of the massive amount of work that goes into preparing for something like the IMO.
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Talent does come naturally to them. Instead of arguing about labels, it's better to think about talent quantitatively. If the USA's IMO contestants were generally slackers, they'd still be comfortably in the top 100 in their birth year (in the entire country) in the AMC/AIME combined score, just by showing up when the teacher told them to. (Well, back in the early 2000's. Maybe competition is stiffer nowadays.) And the gulf in talent between them and the worst kids in that top 100 list is large.
    - andbberger 7y ago
      Why do you have to think about talent at all? Who is them??
    - googthwy123 7y ago
      I didn't end up doing IMO due to weird school situations, but I'd won some prestigious math competitions (two other winners I befriended one year went on to become IMO gold medalists) and was able to solve some IMO problems in middle school on my own. At the time I felt I was just different from others in terms of mathematical ability. My general feeling now is that talent as perceived by others is mostly a function of hard work. Looking back, the level of persistence I was able to apply to mathematical problems at such an early age without any real supervision was incredible. I was almost entirely self-taught from age 7-10 and without being on a strict curriculum, this included some college level math. I think this was a function of a lot of things that don't have much to do with natural ability.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ryanmercer 7y ago
>My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam I wonder if this sets the teacher up for reprimand though via 'no child left behind' type stuff. I wonder what the repercussions would be if a student complained that someone else was getting more attention (advanced work in this case) which received attention from the administration. My fiance is a high school math teacher and just a few weeks ago she had a student claim she was bullying him, which got administration involved with a parent-teacher-administrator-student conference. When the student was asked how he bullies her "she makes me stay awake and do my work in class" which got her off and got her an apology from administration but she was legitimately nervous about it prior to the meeting because that's the state of public education now. Anecdotally, she's doing her best just to get her students capable of doing the assigned math as they will just pop out their phones when she's not looking (or when they think she isn't) and use some app on their phones to tell them the answers (PhotoMath I think) so they aren't even getting the foundations they need to continue to advanced maths. At her current school someone wanting advance placement would be a pretty rare exception. She has multiple students that will write profanities as answers, will draw cartoons as answers, will write things along the lines of "I don't know I want to die" "this doesn't matter" etc the past few years. Seeing the 9 year old in the OP article seems miraculous to us both given the state of things at some schools.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school. I can actually agree with you from experience. I was homeschooled from age 13, but my parents didn’t know enough math to home school me in it, so my mother got me into a dual-enrollment program with a community college for math and CS. Overall I did ok, but calculus really threw me for a loop, and I ended up scraping through calc I & II with C’s. I often wonder if I had taken those classes when I was 20 rather than 15 if I would have done any better. My own son took the test (at his math teachers urging) to get into high school algebra while he was still in middle school. He didn’t pass the test, so he had to take plain-old middle-school algebra, and he was actually a little bummed out about it. I told him that when you’re 30, the only thing that really matters (if anything) is where you went to school, which depends a LOT on your test scores… not how old you were when you took the tests. He knew some of the kids who “made the cut”, and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student.
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student. I keep hearing this when the school wants to put kids on the advanced track. All it does is give them more work and risk lowering their GPA, which is far more important for admissions. One district allegedly give a 0.5 bump just for taking the bait to make up for that. It's all a game.
  - javagram 7y ago
    That’s definitely not just an allegedly thing, my private high school gave a GPA bonus of 0.5 for honors classes and 1.0 for AP classes to avoid this issue. And I’m certain it wasn’t something unusual or hidden, many other schools must have done it also. Goodhart’s law and all that - if unadjusted GPA were the sole number to target, it would make way more sense to take the easiest classes possible and never challenge yourself.
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
arandr0x 7y ago
I'm not sure if your advice is for kids good at math who want to eventually do something else, or kids that actually want to be mathematicians? I always thought being a mathematician was something special in that there is ample historical evidence of very young prodigies in that field who made big contributions. Or are you saying top tier schools for math are so much better, that aspiring mathematicians should wait if at all possible to go to a top tier school? What if he's admitted at a top tier school at 9?
jcora 7y ago
> One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. I think this is very US-specific. Here in Europe there's definitely a huge difference. You enroll in a pure math-only 5 year degree, and are talking about topology in your third semester already. That might be a specific thing only my analysis prof does, but quite a lot of time is devoted to neatly delineating different levels of structure you're equipping a space with, proving things with as less structure as possible or at least discussing it. You are expected to juggle tricks on a totally different level, which takes a lot more qualitatively different practice than in HS. When I talk to people who take math classes in the US it's usually not on that level of engagement until the graduate courses. Maybe it depends on their university, in smaller European countries you often have just like one main math program that is then high-intensity.
- travisjeffery 7y ago
  I think the keyword is "typical." Which is probably true that the math is pretty basic at most universities and in most programs. But you can go to schools like the University of Toronto, which is a strong math school and has very challenging programs like ASSPE1165 (https://fas.calendar.utoronto.ca/mathematics-specialist-science-program-asspe1165. https://fas.calendar.utoronto.ca/mathematics-specialist-scie...)
golemiprague 7y ago
Another option is to just find some related hobbies and improve other skills at the spare time you got since math is too easy. A kid can learn programming or statistics or some operational stuff like how to be really good in excel. Skills that might be useful in the future and does't necessarily requires formal education or certification.

by lacker 7y ago

akhilcacharya 7y ago

I was a pretty mediocre student in high school (as in, I didn’t get into Duke, people like you would consider me a failure etc), what would you say was the biggest difference between the precocious crowd you describe and everyone else? Do you think it’d just inherent? I did community college in high school so I’d say it’s better to eliminate the “boring” general ed classes first but that’s just my experience.

chubot 7y ago

These days it seems like a reasonable alternative for a gifted high school stduent to take online math classes. So they can still socialize with their peers but take some advantage of their advanced ability. I know online classes don't have a great record, but this is probably one of the instances where it makes the most sense. The student is presumably motivated, and if they're not, then it's not a big deal. They're already ahead and can do something else at their regular school.

jcranmer 7y ago
I was in gifted programs until high school, whereupon I went to a magnet school that had lots of opportunities for advanced math people (you could take calculus freshman year and not run out of math courses). The schools (both private and public) broke up the students into effectively the "fast" math group and the "slow" math group. And very often, there was the "me" group, where I was working at my own pace and quickly burning through the math books. As you say, students who have that aptitude for math tend to have a sufficient motivation to do the self-study, especially if the material can be presented as some sort of challenge (how fast can you get through this textbook?).

nostrademons 7y ago

> One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. That wasn't my experience. (I went to a top liberal arts college - it didn't give minors, but I took enough math courses that it would've been a minor at other schools.) In my experience, post-calculus college-level math is qualitatively different from high-school math in focusing on proofs and abstractions over problem-solving, techniques & algorithms. I had an intuitive sense for high-school math. College math kicked my ass, because I was asked to prove everything rigorously, and the proofs just kept coming, dozens of them per homework assignment. That required a very different way of thinking than high-school math did: you needed to remember this large body of theorems and combine them in creative ways to derive new proofs, you couldn't just memorize recipes and techniques that will get you the answer. I found that physics was more like the continuation of high-school math, except that then your courses had all this lab work and experiment design and fundamental physical principles. One of my friends (a math/physics double major) described it like this: "In physics vectors are objects that live in a vector space, while in math a vector space is a set of axioms from which the concept of a vector and rules for manipulating them naturally fall out." Edit: hmm, just looked at the username. I know you, and I also know you're better at math than I am. I'm curious just what kind of math you did in high school and what you did in college where the college math was no harder than high school. Either your high school had some really great math courses or your college had some pretty shitty ones. Maybe it's just where we went to school.

fyp 7y ago
If he was doing olympiads in high school, he was already doing proof-based math then. I think Terry Tao describes the stages of mathematical maturity really well: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
lacker 7y ago
Well, I should be more specific. I think once you get into the sort of number theory where you prove things about modular arithmetic, and the sort of analysis where you are talking about abstract spaces rather than n dimensions of real numbers, those courses are notably different from high school courses, and all the focus on proofs is intellectually stimulating to advanced kids. The courses which are typically boring for advanced kids are calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability, statistics, combinatorics. Most of an undergrad math degree usually falls into this bucket but it really varies by university. Also, there’s a big difference between colleges. Not because of the curriculum as much as the other students who will set the pace of the class. Often the same kid who could attend Ohio State at 14 could also attend Princeton at 18, and that makes a difference even if the course titles are the same.

DaniFong 7y ago

How would taking the AP exam in high school be appropriate in this case? That would be the equivalent of taking an AP exam in math 5 years after graduating EE in college. People are going to have different opinions on whether or not it's worth a 13 year sentence of boredom in order to socialize with age peers, but I really question whether the default high school experience is, for most people, a good thing. Activities like sports and music seem like a vastly better return on effort for advanced kids, with more positive values in the milieu than the typical high school popularity contest. Ultimately, the world is defined by a vast diversity in ages, backgrounds, and capabilities. If you want to do something in that world, and you're really young, you'll first have to get used to being the youngest person in the room. Throw all of this argument out the window if the student actually enjoys school, of course.

lacker 7y ago
Taking the AP exam in high school is just a tactic. A situation like: Student: Man I don't want to take this boring mandatory calculus class. Teacher: You have to. Student: But I already know all this stuff! Teacher: Mmmmm, well that's just like your opinion, man. Student: What if I ace the AP exam? Teacher: OK, then I would believe you. In my experience it's pretty rare for all of high school to be boring. You probably haven't read the particular works they're discussing in English class, you probably haven't read about the particular time period they're discussing in history. And even if you have, there's plenty more you can learn about those things. The most common area to be bored by is math, because you can pick that all up yourself relatively easily.
- DaniFong 7y ago
  I suppose it depends on when this all kicks in. In my case, in kindergarden I was tested into 11th grade; in response I was placed into 1st grade. Which was fine, honestly, I spent a lot of time drawing and so forth, but things got really unpleasant and pointless in 7th grade, so I dropped out, and dropped into college. I'm reading a lot of people complaining about the damage to one's social prospects, and surprisingly few calling out what I experienced: school was minimally useful, the social environment was pretty toxic, and in my case, the teacher was tyrannical. University was so much better! For highly motivated and gifted students, early university can be a great option. It is important to place it on a larger arc of one's own journey of learning, development, and self discovery, however, that must continue for as long as one keeps growing. As an important aside, girls and boys have approximately equal interests in science math and technology earlier on; for girls this changes pretty severely in middle school and high school. I'm sure there a very large social component to this, parents would do well to inoculate against it by finding alternative environments, and university is certainly one.

geoffreyhale 7y ago

The key takeaway to me here is that if you are gifted you should go to a top-tier school, not necessarily wait.

lacker 7y ago
The top-tier schools usually don't accept super-young students, though. What usually happens is, a second-tier school will accept a super-young student because they see no downside. The top-tier schools will tell you, just wait and apply again when you are older. I don't know specifically about the Eindhoven University of Technology but it seems like roughly the 100th best school in Europe, which in the US would be like going to Saint Louis University. A fine school I'm sure, but if you can graduate there when you're 9 then maybe you should just instead go to Harvard when you're 18.
- DaniFong 7y ago
  Lots of people do the equivalent of this, early college classes and then they go to a top tier school for undergrad. I think Reid Barton did this. There are caveats, I know someone who finished the CS curriculum in high school, when he got to Berkeley the only credits he had left for his CS degree were non-CS, which bored him, so he just dropped out and started a startup. Seems fine now, as far as that goes, aside from the exodus from the bay area that the housing situation has forced on many of us...

foobaw 7y ago

Most people that attend IMO are prodigies but generally, sociable. I met many of them and they just love math.

andbberger 7y ago
> Most people that attend IMO are prodigies Can we all agree to never use that word? Actual prodigies are measure zero in the general population. Terry Tao is a prodigy. The rest of us are just normal schmucks. Prodigy suggests that talent comes naturally to and is dismissive of the massive amount of work that goes into preparing for something like the IMO.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  Talent does come naturally to them. Instead of arguing about labels, it's better to think about talent quantitatively. If the USA's IMO contestants were generally slackers, they'd still be comfortably in the top 100 in their birth year (in the entire country) in the AMC/AIME combined score, just by showing up when the teacher told them to. (Well, back in the early 2000's. Maybe competition is stiffer nowadays.) And the gulf in talent between them and the worst kids in that top 100 list is large.
  - andbberger 7y ago
    Why do you have to think about talent at all? Who is them??
  - googthwy123 7y ago
    I didn't end up doing IMO due to weird school situations, but I'd won some prestigious math competitions (two other winners I befriended one year went on to become IMO gold medalists) and was able to solve some IMO problems in middle school on my own. At the time I felt I was just different from others in terms of mathematical ability. My general feeling now is that talent as perceived by others is mostly a function of hard work. Looking back, the level of persistence I was able to apply to mathematical problems at such an early age without any real supervision was incredible. I was almost entirely self-taught from age 7-10 and without being on a strict curriculum, this included some college level math. I think this was a function of a lot of things that don't have much to do with natural ability.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ryanmercer 7y ago

>My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam I wonder if this sets the teacher up for reprimand though via 'no child left behind' type stuff. I wonder what the repercussions would be if a student complained that someone else was getting more attention (advanced work in this case) which received attention from the administration. My fiance is a high school math teacher and just a few weeks ago she had a student claim she was bullying him, which got administration involved with a parent-teacher-administrator-student conference. When the student was asked how he bullies her "she makes me stay awake and do my work in class" which got her off and got her an apology from administration but she was legitimately nervous about it prior to the meeting because that's the state of public education now. Anecdotally, she's doing her best just to get her students capable of doing the assigned math as they will just pop out their phones when she's not looking (or when they think she isn't) and use some app on their phones to tell them the answers (PhotoMath I think) so they aren't even getting the foundations they need to continue to advanced maths. At her current school someone wanting advance placement would be a pretty rare exception. She has multiple students that will write profanities as answers, will draw cartoons as answers, will write things along the lines of "I don't know I want to die" "this doesn't matter" etc the past few years. Seeing the 9 year old in the OP article seems miraculous to us both given the state of things at some schools.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school. I can actually agree with you from experience. I was homeschooled from age 13, but my parents didn’t know enough math to home school me in it, so my mother got me into a dual-enrollment program with a community college for math and CS. Overall I did ok, but calculus really threw me for a loop, and I ended up scraping through calc I & II with C’s. I often wonder if I had taken those classes when I was 20 rather than 15 if I would have done any better. My own son took the test (at his math teachers urging) to get into high school algebra while he was still in middle school. He didn’t pass the test, so he had to take plain-old middle-school algebra, and he was actually a little bummed out about it. I told him that when you’re 30, the only thing that really matters (if anything) is where you went to school, which depends a LOT on your test scores… not how old you were when you took the tests. He knew some of the kids who “made the cut”, and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student.

phkahler 7y ago
>> and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student. I keep hearing this when the school wants to put kids on the advanced track. All it does is give them more work and risk lowering their GPA, which is far more important for admissions. One district allegedly give a 0.5 bump just for taking the bait to make up for that. It's all a game.
- javagram 7y ago
  That’s definitely not just an allegedly thing, my private high school gave a GPA bonus of 0.5 for honors classes and 1.0 for AP classes to avoid this issue. And I’m certain it wasn’t something unusual or hidden, many other schools must have done it also. Goodhart’s law and all that - if unadjusted GPA were the sole number to target, it would make way more sense to take the easiest classes possible and never challenge yourself.
pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago

arandr0x 7y ago

I'm not sure if your advice is for kids good at math who want to eventually do something else, or kids that actually want to be mathematicians? I always thought being a mathematician was something special in that there is ample historical evidence of very young prodigies in that field who made big contributions. Or are you saying top tier schools for math are so much better, that aspiring mathematicians should wait if at all possible to go to a top tier school? What if he's admitted at a top tier school at 9?

jcora 7y ago

> One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. I think this is very US-specific. Here in Europe there's definitely a huge difference. You enroll in a pure math-only 5 year degree, and are talking about topology in your third semester already. That might be a specific thing only my analysis prof does, but quite a lot of time is devoted to neatly delineating different levels of structure you're equipping a space with, proving things with as less structure as possible or at least discussing it. You are expected to juggle tricks on a totally different level, which takes a lot more qualitatively different practice than in HS. When I talk to people who take math classes in the US it's usually not on that level of engagement until the graduate courses. Maybe it depends on their university, in smaller European countries you often have just like one main math program that is then high-intensity.

travisjeffery 7y ago
I think the keyword is "typical." Which is probably true that the math is pretty basic at most universities and in most programs. But you can go to schools like the University of Toronto, which is a strong math school and has very challenging programs like ASSPE1165 (https://fas.calendar.utoronto.ca/mathematics-specialist-science-program-asspe1165. https://fas.calendar.utoronto.ca/mathematics-specialist-scie...)

golemiprague 7y ago

Another option is to just find some related hobbies and improve other skills at the spare time you got since math is too easy. A kid can learn programming or statistics or some operational stuff like how to be really good in excel. Skills that might be useful in the future and does't necessarily requires formal education or certification.