Let The Games Begin

Preliminary investigations into academic competitions

Theories of Progress is a series from Education Progress building the intellectual framework for durable education reform: why the system resists improvement, what excellence actually requires, and what history tells us about how to build it.

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In Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster (2020), Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule find that a student who wins a gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) is fifty times more likely to receive a Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, than a doctorate holder from a top-ten mathematics program.

Most find this surprising. While our most selective graduate programs boast prestigious admissions committees that employ intricate selection processes, it is teenage performance on the IMO that proves a far more reliable measure of lifetime in mathematics achievement. And the predictive power of an IMO gold medal extends well beyond the Fields: every additional point scored in the competition carries 2.6% more math publications and 4.5% more citations.

The research on academic competitions has received surprisingly little attention, as have the communities of practice dedicated to training for them. Most discussion around advanced education focuses on schools, the classroom, and policies to reform them. Yet findings like those of Agarwal and Gaule reveal that academic competitions are a better instrument than we’ve credited for identifying and fostering academic talent.

Considering the role competition plays in athletics, it shouldn’t be hard to see why competition deserves more of our focus. Competitive settings draw out excellence in a domain. We expect to find exemplars of athletic ability at the World Cup, at the Olympics, at Las Vegas’s Ninja Warrior competitions. If we are serious about searching for the future builders of the knowledge frontier, academic competitions are the scouting pool.

How accurately might other competitions predict disciplinary renown? Does the Computer Science Olympiad predict anything about computer scientists? Does Moot Court or Policy Debate predict success as a judge or a politician? Do some competitions train people to innovate or speculate or investigate well, while others waste time on tortuous trivialities? We already value Quizbowl and the Junior Classical League competitions for fostering student enjoyment in the liberal-arts, but if they successfully measure or foster even greater qualities, we may not value liberal-arts competitions nearly enough.

We need not demand every math curriculum be organized around IMO drills to be curious whether new competitions or grander competition ecosystems could advance the careers of more young talent and geniuses. A working theory at Education Progress is that creating the conditions for robust academic competitions will reshape our education system for the better. Consider now just three of their strengths.

Academic competitions:

1. Promote the right pedagogy,

2. Send the right signal, and

3. Cultivate the right culture.

To understand why they do so effectively, we’ll examine each virtue in turn.

The Right Pedagogy

A recurrent criticism of our education system is that too many education school professors and classroom teachers are taken in by ineffective instructional practices, despite years of well-founded empirical evidence that testify to their flaws. But the appeal of “child-centered learning” and “21st century skills,” for example, has always owed more to their vibes than their research records.

Academic competitions are refreshingly resistant to these fads. The clear goals around which competitions are organized affords a corresponding clarity about the means by which students should pursue them. These contests present students with challenging problems meant to delight, instruct, and reward persistence. Solving these problems requires the deft use of methods, methods which in themselves need not be difficult to apply; at least in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science olympiads, the difficulty lies in choosing the right sequence of methods to make progress on open-ended challenges. But the way to improve is less open-ended: practice deliberately, then practice some more. The training that nurtures the traits that ground deftness, that improves one’s speed, insight, and decision-making in approaching new problems, involves the regular, repeated completion of other like problems.

A team of students get together and work on old problem sets; they piece it out through scribbles on scratchpads; they refer to their socratic mentor when stumped; they struggle and push and master the methods; and slowly, learning from failures and improving with time, they begin to see how simple skills can be versatilely employed. Ostensibly this process is the way to fulfill the goals of academic competition; pedagogically, the preparation itself is the point. The deliberate practice by which students pursue the goals of competition is the same kind of deliberate practice that advances the goals of education writ large. The persistence one develops for working through problems is likewise the same that serves students in curricular studies; the delight one feels when competing toward a solution is the same we want to motivate all students to chase. By spotlighting an objective that can only be achieved by consistent cognitive exercise, academic competition distills the experience of good instructional practice for students as well as does any pedagogical framework.

The Right Signals

Signaling theorists such as Bryan Caplan have claimed that the larger part of higher education’s function is to indicate a person’s pre-existing abilities, rather than to instill her with new ones. If students primarily wanted knowledge out of schools, they would agonize after getting a snow day. For the signaling theorist, the fact that they’re characteristically jubilant instead is a clue: students mostly want the certification that testifies to employers that they have that knowledge, not the knowledge itself.

Now, for critics who think education’s value is mostly a matter of signaling, the proponents of academic competition have good news, courtesy of Agarwal and Gaule: winning gold at the IMO is a fantastically stronger signal of mathematical ability than even a PhD from those top universities the critics are wont to scorn.

There are real structural reasons explaining why the signal strength of academic-competition laurels is resistant to many of the diluents plaguing college diplomas. Everyone is well aware of how grade inflation creeps everywhere, but competitions weather subjective bias far better than grade point average. Like the Princeton A’s of yesteryear, IMO gold medals are capped at ≈12.5% of participants. Anchoring the recipient count to a percentage of total participants simply subverts the collective-action spiral and preserves the meaning of the achievement.

Such competitions also sidestep admissions administrators as arbiters of value. Personal essays and holistic admissions policies again introduce subjective bias, on top of suffering from incomparability and patronage. While the stain of nepotism and meretricious superficiality permeates class markers, a wide candid world wants it straight: who is the swiftest, the strongest, the wisest, the learned, the skillful? That world appreciates how academic competitions remain comparatively clear signals for talent and achievement, as do the students themselves.

The stranger and wanderer and outsider can prove their worth in a fair competition. This is why the international scene of the IMO is also a route to upward mobility, and allows the discovery of talents hidden in the rough. The high performing low-income students who make it to a top ten school flourish.

However it is not all roses for the low-income performers. Agarwal and Gaule found that low-income country participants in the IMO are 16% less likely to get a PhD, have 34% fewer publications, and 56% fewer citations. These stats provide a hard nudge. They hint that much talent and possible accomplishment languishes for lack of employment, or lack of proper attention or opportunity.

A general merit and fairness problem persists across the entire world, and though it has existed forever, it need not persist as it always has. This gap can be closed. To provide a clear example, consider Tran et al’s research on gifted and talented sorting in Arkansas: 30% of students scoring in the top 5% on standardized tests were not identified as gifted, and students receiving free and reduced-price lunch were only half as likely to be so identified! Solutions to this underrepresentation are not hard to imagine. Better mentorship and policy in this area will be (relatively) cheap and effective. Allow the score to speak, and do not let teacher recommendations stand in the way.

The Right Culture

Competition builds culture by providing public honors and personal glory to those who do well, and by giving their friends a person to cheer for. In athletics this is so obvious that a blind mole can see it. But in the context of academic pursuit, we provide precious few outlets for such motivations. A student who otherwise has little way to know their worth, learns their own talent and nascent interests, and what is more they can be energized by the taste of victory. Few do not hearken to that for which they get riches. In other words, honors give participants a stake in the ends of the tournament, a greater interest in math, biology, law, or whatever it may be.

Four years ago I started building a regional logic tournament, inviting middle and high school students from schools around the St. Louis area to participate in a two hour competition as part of a team. Indeed my goal has been to build a local culture of academic struggle and conquest. I picked logic problems as the basis for the tournament for a few reasons. Knowing that many bright students have not felt the intrigue that good math problems can offer, I realized that the self-identified literary types still will show up to prove their logical abilities. The mathematically inclined would come anyway. It was the less-well-mathed that I wanted as well. Cast a wider net, catch more types of students.

The Logic Tournaments offers meaningful cash prizes for first, second, and third place, as well as honors to the student and their school on the Uriel statue and plaque publicly displayed all year. The students themselves have transformed the tournament. The students clearly expect the tournament will happen each year, and this propels the whole machinery forward. The culture of the competition is not just offered to students; students await the competition, and adults must rise to the challenge of delivering it.

A younger Jack Despain Zhou, before starting Education Progress, first realized the fun of competition in a Utah math tournament. He received an award for a top finish. More than just the public acknowledgement of his strengths, those honors gave him the confidence in his abilities, the spark of motivation, and the shiny new laptop he needed to give back to the commons.

In addition to facilitating individual self-discovery, these competitions also provide a setting for new collaborations; they bring together people who would otherwise be more isolated, removing impediments to a wide pool of likely confederates. Two parents at the school I run met years ago as youth at a math competition in Tokyo. Their interest was very long distance for a number of years, while he Carolina boy, and she a Chilena, contrived to build a family together in St. Louis.

The pianists and mathematicians Holden Mui and Andrew Wu also met at a mathematics competition. And now they collaborate not on math, but on music. Putting together piano pieces like this one, Poetry rivaling Ravel.

Academic competitions and Education Progress

So we at Education Progress have begun to explore the state of academic competitions. We are looking for insights, studying the field, reviewing the research, and weighing programs that we suspect will push the next generation of competitions and competitors forward.

Expect more from us soon on this (and other) topics — we’re quite excited to show everyone what we have been working on.

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References

Agarwal, Ruchir, and Patrick Gaule. 2020. “Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?” American Economic Review: Insights 2 (4): 409–24. [link]

Tran, Bich Thi Ngoc, Jonathan Wai, Sarah McKenzie, Jonathan Mills, and Dustin Seaton. 2022. “Expanding Gifted Identification to Capture Academically Advanced, Low-Income, or Other Disadvantaged Students: The Case of Arkansas.” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 45 (1): 64–83.

Plutarch. 1916. “Pericles.” In Lives, Volume III, translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.