Sure the WINNERS are exceptional. They would be in any competition. The great part is that just preparing (practicing) makes people stronger problem solvers. Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork.

To echo the parent, though: the school is NOT bragging about success on AMC contests. Probably because they do not have it.

Similar prep with a strong group of incoming students does work to produce successful AMC and AIME results, I can attest.

> Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork.

Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning.

I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal.

And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.

> Because their 'preparations' usually suck.

I think we're much better off now, thanks to Art of Problem Solving's Alcumus, Richard Rusczyk, all the top-tier video lessons out there, etc-- along with just things like being able to hand out Khan practice for general math topics. We're getting much better at teaching top students how to solve hard problems (and, as a result, the AMC8/10/12, AIME, Olympiads, MathCounts, et al... are getting much harder-- these days if you want to prepare for the AMC8 you should be studying old AMC10 problems).

The same can't be said about overall societal performance in teaching the entire population.

To be fair, I don't think your posts are making the distinction between A B and C.

I would say A and C are both reasonable. To get higher performance out of existing candidates, you would need a metric for performance... I am unfortunately not aware of one that is robust enough to be used.

To do A you need a good metric, which as you point out we don't have. Of course, it's also zero-sum.

You might be able to do B with pay for performance if you had a good metric.

C might make things significantly better 10 years from now-- increasing the size of the candidate pool. Of course, this requires you be able to adequately measure candidates, too.

I think we should increase teacher pay. I don't think it changes much soon in the quality of education. I do think improving teacher working conditions--- especially the ones that infuriate teachers because they have well articulated justifications of worsening student outcomes--- can improve all of the above.