It's AMC-12 scores aren't awful. It's at roughly 50th percentile for AMC which (given who takes the AMC) probably puts it in the top 5% or so of high school students in math ability. It's AMC 10 score being dramatically lower is pretty bad though...
The best score 60 is 5 correct answers + 20 blank answers; or 6 correct, 4 correct random guesses, and 15 incorrect random guesses. (20% chance of correct guess)
The 5 easiest questions are relatively simple calculations, once the parsing task is achieved.
AMC/AIME and even to some extent USAMO/IMO problems are hard for humans because they are time-limited and closed-book. But they aren't conceptually hard -- they are solved by applying a subset of known set of theorems a few times to the input data.
The hard part of math, for humans, is ingesting data into their brains, retaining it, and searching it. Humans are bad a memorizing large databases of symbolic data, but that's trivial for a large computer system.
An AI system has a comprehensive library, and high-speech search algorithms.
Can someone who pays $20/month please post some sample AMC10/AMC12 Q&A?
