Seeing by myself how the Korean kids hack out gold medals in international math/physics olympiads by drilling the hell out in cram schools (and then most of the

Seeing by myself how the Korean kids hack out gold medals in international math/physics olympiads by drilling the hell out in cram schools (and then most of them going to medical school with these credentials anyway), I really don’t have a good impression for these contests. Often the problems seem incredibly contrived and its connection to the real world (or at least higher-level academia) seems dubious. These contests might seem to test creativity in a superficial glance, but these cram schools have a database of past/potential problems in their “problem bank” and once high schoolers grind away thousands of these questions for a long period of time they can solve these like robots. (Obviously you still need to be smart enough to do this, but I really don’t believe it is a good nurturer of creativity.) I’ve seen lots of friends passionate and skilled in math and science but either fail to do well in these contests, or don’t give a single fuck about it due to the problems I’ve described.