As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.
The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.
I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.
There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).
Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.
However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.
I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters.
But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.
I can only agree. Higher education for the mass is dangerous, especially when there are not enough jobs for them and they have to take a heavy loan to finance their education.
Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.
I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.
Elite overproduction is an interesting topic and putting aside any suggestion that it's a precise mathematical predictor, it obviously creates societal problems.
That is - you've created a large class of intelligent achievers with nothing for them to do. Arguably that just naturally produces increasing societal upheaval. Whether that means revolution or just chaotic increasingly populist elections is a matter of degrees.
Nevermind the lack of data - what even would be the limits of knowledge in such a model? If it was widely believed that society will collapse at some point in the next 30 years, how would human behavior change in response? How would that affect the original prediction?
> Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites).
I know i will get downvoted for this but i feel HN is losing its intellectual side over such elitist crap more and more. The original article is from a well-known racist / eugenist and people here keep going on posting more dubious content that tries to paint towards political policies to keep the masses out of higher education.
If you keep the masses intentionally dumb, then it makes sense to do the next step and also ban them from voting. And imagine to what kind of society this is leading.
Actually, voting is an excellent way to keep power away from the masses. A dictatorship has to constantly be aware of its approval ratings, whereas a parliament can ignore them for 3-4 years at a time.
I do not have the impression that any politician who is not about to retire, does not care about approval ratings. There is more to democracy, than voting once every 4 years.
I disagree. Improving education for everyone reduces the barrier for cross domain improvements to occur. An artist who may need some technical knowledge to realize a vision would not be able to do so if the basis of that knowledge was barred through inherent passion. It also provides the long term basis for startup and business creation, which is precisely the actual solution to elite overproduction.
One challenge in this is how to prevent permanent alienation between the masses & high achievers where you separate them at increasingly earlier points of life.
I went to school in a small town where I still shared some non-core classes with the masses, and only had separate tracks for some science/math courses starting at say 13 or 14 years old. But I still had gym/art/homeroom/etc with the masses right until graduation at 18 years old.
The trend has of course been to split the smarter kids out at younger and younger ages.. you see completely separate smart kids schools starting at 14 or 11 years old. You hear stories of pre-K and kindergarten programs that require your kid test in, as if they can asses the intelligence of a 3 year old.
As a society I would observe it makes the masses more resentful & distrusting towards "the elites" and "the elites" more oblivious to what the life for 99% of the country actually entails.
Unfortunately, in my class of students, being good at solving Olympiad level questions did not turn out to be a good predictor of their contributions to society.
What is more important, raising next generation of Musks (albeit ideally much less broken sociopathic piece of shit as current one), or avoiding next generation of Trumps?
Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.
So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.
So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.
The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting/engaging teachers and tutors imaginable, and they're still just not going to excel.
And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.
And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.
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I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.
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Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.
People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.
In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.
They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.
I would be willing to bet intelligence is a much larger deciding factor in grades than interest is. Most people I know who got top grades had barely any interest in many of the subjects
People are different but the demands of 99% of actual jobs are far below that those natural differences won't matter as opposed to standardized training.
And it's a good thing that it's like that, because we don't want our society to be reliant on a few Rockstars. As Napoleon stated, an individual Mamluk far exceeded an individual Frenchman, but 1000 Frenchman could always defeat 1000 Mamluks.
Here's one issue. Romania has a really lousy motorway system, what there is of it. I gather that corruption has much to do with this apart from construction difficulties involving the Carpathians. As an example there isn't even a motorway between Bucharest and Brasov (88 miles or 141 km apart), the latter being a favorite destination for tourists and wealthy and not-so wealthy second home owners alike. The trip by car either way is usually a nightmare. I should add that Brasov is one of the major towns of Romania not just a tourist attraction.
To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.
A fun fact surprisingly not mentioned in the article, and which I thought would be topical at this time, is that the Romanians apparently love their math olympiads so much that they recently elected as their president an International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) medalist. The current president Nicușor Dan had perfect scores at the IMO both times he participated (one of only 12 students so far with a perfect score in each of their ≥2 participations [1]). In fact at IMO 1988 he was one of only 11 students who solved the famous/notorious “Vieta jumping” problem [2], which eluded even Terence Tao (who, to be fair, was participating at only 13 years old!).
The Wikipedia section of “Notable [IMO] participants” has three sections: “Mathematicians”, “Computer scientists”, and “Other”, with Dan being the sole entry in the last one. :) [3]
Sure, but that's not why he was elected president. Well, not directly.
His Olympiad results led to him getting a doctorate at Sorbonne, which led to him speaking french, which led to impressing Macron who threw France's weight into supporting Dan.
It was a power move to replace the German influence with French influence (previous praesident was ethnic German)
He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR)
He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages)
He is religious as well (pretty important aparently)
All his opponents were much less competent.
A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the counter candidate is worse (because of iliescu and corruptiob)
The AUR candidate really is a russian puppet and not that smart either, he's mostly there for the 30% vote extremists always get and which were taken by georgescu first time. It's a shame he got far and shows how much influence external actors can have over facebook/tiktok etc.
The USR candidate that managed to squeeze through first time has no charisma and was a backup since Nicusor refused the first time...
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., it seems that many neighbouring countries who had similar schooling systems perform similarly or better "per capita" (Hungary with <10M people, placed 5th; Romania 19M at 6th; Bulgaria with <7M at 8th; Serbia at 30th with <8M, Croatia at 42nd with <5M people — two of which should probably get some share of Yugoslavia's medals at 39th — there's also Serbia and Montenegro separately).
So, Romania is at the sweet spot of high selectivity and population size to really pop out in these types of competitions, but it seem it's not really that unique as it's being suggested.
Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.
That is roughly equivalent to what I did in honors math in the 90s in the US.
Looking over the math curriculum in the same school district today, the current level of instruction doesn't even come close. Standards have sadly fallen.
My grade school education in the US was similar to this (although you needed to qualify for "accelerated" math). There were maybe 90 people every year in this. Those who did well did not make it much past CML or AMC, maybe out of lack of interest. You had to be excellent to move on to Olympiad level maths.
Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.
Having seen what children are capable of, it’s neither overwhelming nor brutal.
What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content. We live in what could be a golden age of thought but for the average kid it’s anything but.
I have to agree with you. Children are adaptable and will rise to the challenge. The west too often prefers to think children are capable of nothing, and have them wallow in an intellectual void.
While I think the west is a huge generalization, I don't think the west thinks children are capable of nothing. It's more about letting children be children and play. Rather than forcing them to "work" almost constantly from a very young age.
I don't really envy the school systems that force kids to work very hard from an early age to get into a fancy university. From what I understand it's usually school systems with a heavy focus on rote memorization as well and that takes up quite a bit of time with diminishing results.
Having been through a post-Soviet school system, it's not about rote memorization, at least not in maths. The point is spending as much time with a problem as necessarily, without having a predefined algorithm, until it cracks. It's such a useful skill and satisfying experience that I feel sad that some children are denied it for the sake of psychological comfort.
It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down.
It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can just heat up some tendies?
Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.
> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved.
It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.
> It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries.
I’m 42 years old and something like this was already said about kids when I was a child (I suspect it was like that before my time as well). Children’s palate develops with age and so does their taste.
"Because Romania is a member state of the European Union, the people the country has put great effort into training and credentialing are easily able to leave the country and acquire jobs elsewhere"
and
"free movement of talent between countries, Romania ends up subsidizing talent discovery for other countries with less apt educational systems"
Are pretty negative stances.
UE is a union, so it's a pretty different situation than students leaving eg third world country to come to Europe. And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. I hope such phenomenon progressively average the situation between UE countries and closes the gaps that may currently exist.
The EU echoes the SU, sadly. Central government, central planning, central banks, mix people, no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities, flatten the social structures, and most importantly, destroy the family unit. Young couples can't buy a house and can't afford to raise kids. And young Europeans face high unemployment and low wages for life-consuming jobs with not much career prospects.
Remote work would've lessen that. But it seems they didn't like it so they quickly rolled it back after the pandemic.
I believe the original intent of such Olympiads was to test how pupils equipped with only standard school education would tackle non-standard puzzles. Eventually this turned into pupils attending special schools, having coaches, doing such non-standrdad puzzles all day long during their studies in order to win medals. A leetcode grind all the way down.
I think it's the other way round. There were special schools or special groups in regular schools that prepared Soviet children to STEM careers by making them solve a lot of puzzles. Then IMO appeared on top of that to celebrate highest achievers
The Olympics were originally founded on the principle of amateurism, on grassroots, individual passion and love of the sport, not as a career or life achievement.
To see what's its become today, especially how some suffer greatly to get the gold medal is depressing, if not disgusting when all of this are ultimately trivial activities. They were supposed to be a unifying reprieve from the real issues of the 20th century, not another stage of brutal national competition.
After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...
I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
Well, a lot of countries aren't worth leaving. Taking my home of the UK as an example, Wikipedia lists 19 countries with higher GDP per capita, but if I don't want to learn a new language, overcome bureaucratic obstacles and leave my family behind, there is nowhere to go and this criteria describes almost everybody who gets an education here, even the smart ones. Romania is #53 on the list and their EU membership means they can emigrate easily.
The education system is stratified, keeping high-achieving students together, promoting them to schools with good teachers, etc.
OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?
It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
I wonder if national averages actually matter very much beyond being a vanity statistic? While it's good to have a generally more mathematically capable population, you would expect most actual "progress" (papers, discoveries, things built) to be made by the outliers.
I guess there's another layer tho in 2025 where, assuming they are rational, you wouldn't necessarily expect their efforts to benefit Romania.
In a global economy I think a good national average is more important than the peaks. The genius invention will spread, and there is significant value in having a population which can utilise it.
As another example, if cancer is cured tomorrow it won't necessarily be the country which found the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most competent doctors, able to use and apply the cure.
I would first caution against reducing education to the practical and the economic. Education is much more, and much more important, that just that.
Second, I would caution against the trope that invention is some exclusive province of the "genius".
That out of the way, we can look to network effects. Consider that a populace with high literacy will permit more of the kind of collaboration that has literacy as a prerequisite, while one with low literacy and a few outliers won't. The outliers are constrained in how much they can collaborate, and collaboration is essential to scientific and economic development.
Yes, a numerate population as assessed by national averages matters. A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely. Numeracy is closely tied to the ability to work in a variety of occupations. If we consider probability and statistics, the implications are especially salient.
>A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely.
People with good STEM education, even with PhDs in that field aren’t necessarily competent voters and good decision makers outside of area of their interests. Understanding economic policies is still an effort that many aren’t willing to take.
This seems to me more like a reasonable hypothesis than a foregone conclusion.
Personally I suspect there's a floor (can read a chart, understands growth rates and compounding in general) which the public need to assess arguments constructed by specialists, while the rest is mostly understanding ideology.
The reason I believe that is, I think I can pretty much predict 100% of the conclusion of most articles written for the public by knowing the names & affiliations of the authors and the topic. The only uncertainty is what sources and statistics they will pick to reach the conclusion required by their ideology.
A numerate and literate population matters for many reasons, but in theory it’s possible to field a strong team for the Olympiad despite an abysmal national average literacy level. Just look at North Korea for example. They’ve got a “fat right tail” of sophisticated hackers but on average their literacy is terrible.
Idiot author aside, even if the students were outliers being sent to the Olympiad, that would not explain the consistent performance over decades. Relative to the size of the country, and compared to the other dominant nations, the outliers seem disproportionate.
> The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
This is the usual argument against stratified education systems but is it proven in any way? My experience with stratified systems is that they increase both high quantiles and the average. Maybe (even if not established), maybe they reduce low quantiles like the 0.1th, but very unlikely they damage the average. Quite the opposite.
It's kind of like this idea that communism makes an average citizen richer which sounds logical, but in the end everyone's poorer. Remove the stratification and there's no incentive to do anything.
The figure in the article claims to show that this is indeed the case -- though as I noted in my other comments, the y axis is actually uninterpretable ("percentiles" can't be negative).
Author aside I thought this was a very interesting answer to a question I didn't know I had.
I had been thinking that sending my children to a school with high achievers could leave her at a relative disadvantage but this data would seem to say otherwise.
I wonder if this conflicts with Malcolm Gladwell's observations on one's relative ranking when it comes to college matriculation (that its more important to be at a high percentile of your institution than your global rank)
One of the unintended but hard to avoid consequences of a high competition education environment is a lot of broken kids. Dealing with constant pressure and failure is hard even for adults, for some children it's literally fatal. Don't forget to consider this as well
What is the answer that you found? All I see is a marginally defensible claim in the 24th paragraph. I stopped reading after that, although there were only a few paragraphs left.
Bulgaria has been performing pretty well despite of the declining quality of education, which was stellar during Communism. Nobody was pushing us to advance in Math and Science; there was just nothing better to do. I wish these times could come back. Right now, kids are faced with all kinds of distractions and little incentive to go into studying seriously.
Actually, throughout Eastern Europe, there was an excellent math and science curriculum during the socialist era. Despite all the negatives of this system, the good education was one of the huge positives. In the last 30 years in Bulgaria, there has been a significant decline, but some good traditions are still maintained, at least in the elite schools.
> Since 2020, Romania’s performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) has been nothing short of amazing. In 2022, Romania came in fifth overall, fourth in 2023, and twelfth in 2024.
Here's how those three years compare to surrounding years:
I'm not sure much can be read into this. The participants are usually high school students, and the top contestants from a given country usually participate in multiple years, and each country's team had 6 contestants.
It only takes getting a two or three outstanding students for a country to shoot significantly up for a couple years or so, depending on how close in age those students are.
For the 3 years the article mentions, 2022-2024, Romania had 2 people who were there all 3 years, 5 people who were there for 2 of the 3 years, and only 2 people who were only there for 1 year.
The 2023 team had 5 people from 2022. For 2024 half the 2023 team was replaced.
Looking at several years of their teams and individual performances it looks like they regularly have people who do well. A lot of people place in ranked 150+ one year, then shoot way up in the next year or next two, and then drop way down again.
For example they had a guy who 2018-2020 ranked 174, 15, 4. But they didn't in those last two years have anyone else also peaking.
In 2021-2024 they had a guy who went 143, 32, 1, 82.
In 2021-2023 they had a guy who went 319, 23, 46.
In 2017-2025 all the years except 2022-2024 had 2 people in the top 100. 2022 and 2023 had all 6 in the top 100, and 2024 had 3 in the top 100.
Looking at all this 2022-2024 plausibly could be explained as just a matter of timing. They seem to always have some people who are good enough to get a high score at least once. Some do it their first year and then don't participate any more. Some participate multiple times but only hit that high once. A smaller number hit multiple highs.
With just a small change in the timing of when some of these people appear or when they hit their peaks, so that they happen at the same time instead of missing each other by a small number of years, many of those other teams could before 2022 could have been top 10 teams.
Update: here is Romania's rank going backwards from 2025 to 1979:
It looks like they did very well in the IMP during their last decade of Communism (which ended there in 1989, and also for the decade after that.
For the next 10 years they fell off a little. It was during this time (2003 specifically) that they started using a national test to assign people to high schools.
The decade after that fell off a little more. It was at the start of that decade (2010) that they switched to the Evaluarea Națională mentioned in the article.
This is a very interesting topic and the article seems quite thorough. But I have trouble interpreting the crucial "School and track sorting can bolster or bust academic achievement" plots: The y axis is labelled "Graduation score percentile", but it has negative numbers on the scale. How are these values being corrected?
The series for 1-school towns on the left plot is basically flat; am I supposed to believe that, in such towns, students entering the school with a 0.5 on the high school admission test appear at the same exit exam percentile (implying that they have the same average exit exam scores) as those who entered with a 9.5? That can't possibly be true.
ETA: I also thought the conclusion -- that other countries should adopt a similar education model -- was out of step with most of the body text, which seemed to stress the downsides for weaker students. (There's no actual contradiction here, and perhaps the claim about most of society's advances being due to the top-end achievers was intended to justify this angle, but I was nevertheless surprised that there wasn't much discussion of why this upside should overpower the concerns for weaker students.)
That seems plausible, but change with respect to what baseline? I think the sensible baseline would be the entry exam percentile (x axis), but others are conceivable.
A 1 school town is highly likely to be a small rural town with limited economic prospects. Like plenty of CEE countries, the overwhelming majority of opportunities have historically been clustered in the capital and a couple regional cities.
The kind of town or village with only a single school is going to have fewer social benefits or services compared to an urban school.
Basically, what it is saying is students in those kinds of towns are s** out of luck statistically speaking compared to their urban peers.
There's a reason Romania's HDI has remained lower than Russia's until recently thanks to EU funding to help develop Romania (which is now on track to become a major economic pole in the CEE)
Edit: can't reply
> A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)
I recommend checking it out. It explains the methodology and some potential wonkiness. It's always good to read the docs
I acknowledge that effect is present, but it's simply not strong enough to dominate natural variation in ability (for which high school entrance exam scores are a proxy) to the point where the results are completely flat -- in fact, students who achieved the highest scores on the entrance exam were slightly lower in exit scores on average than those with low or medium entrance scores!
What this tells me is that some kind of correction is being applied to those y values (we already know this because of negatives numbers on a "percentile" axis) -- but what?
A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)
The author is Jordan Lasker (also known by internet handle Crémieux). Much of Lasker's work and commentary focuses on race and IQ, and he has promoted eugenics. On X and Substack, Lasker is known for compiling charts on what he calls the "Black-White IQ gap"
The way he investigates how many of the winners from Romania are "Jews" (because apparently you can tell that by looking at their name and picture or whatever) is also very sus.
The problem with all IQ and race correlations is that you can never actually remove the effects of prenatal and childhood nutrition, socioeconomic differences, quality of education etc. Indeed, if you stabilize them, the differences go away. And that's still saying nothing of the culture-neutrality of IQ tests themselves.
Sound arguments from faulty premises are still sound arguments – but identifying whether premises are valid is hard. (My heuristic, "if a sound argument concludes that racism is true, there's something wrong with the premises", is pretty effective in telling me where to look, but doesn't eliminate the hard work of distinguishing truth from falsehood.)
I think Poland is in very similar spot, often punching above its weight in software and math. My own amateur explanation is that Polish language is pretty complex and very particular about correct words and word forms. So Polish kids get a good training in keeping track of details of notations just by learning their native language.
And then there is China - remember that IOI for instance accepts 4 people from each country.
After all it all comes down to individuals. In Poland, there is famous informatics high school teacher who is credited for producing most IOI/IOM medalist per high school pupil in the world I believe.
They have special training program there. Another thing is to actually find geniuses, obviously. And if you don’t believe in geniuses, meet Jake - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OR36jrx_L44
For example, Jakub Pachocki (director of engineering of OpenAI) who graduated this high school, actually was on the verge of getting F from maths in his previous high school, because of problems being to easy I believe. Then they made the transfer where he could finally thrive. Interestingly, he wanted to do phd in 2 years in University of Warsaw, but people there didn’t want to allow it just because so they lost him - he went to do his PhD at Carnegie Mellon.
To summarise, from what I understand formula would be something like genius + great, inspiring and allowing teacher(s) + special personalised teaching programs + supportive environment.
Also don’t assume that these outliers are testament to the level of education of general population.
That's a problem with the opportunity in the country rather with the schools. Being able to produce exceptional students is an advantage, now figure out how to make them stay.
I would downvote you, but I won't, and instead I will leave a reply.
I was one of those students who left. Romania did not waste any more taxpayer money on me than on other students, and that money that it spent was really meager by any Western standards.
My kids now go to public school in NYC. The city spends north of $30k for each of them [1]. Yet, if they decide to leave the US nobody will complain that they were groomed with precious taxpayer money, and they betrayed the trust placed in them. It is understood that every person has the right pursue their own happiness the best way they can.
I'm assuming you went to a good school in Romania, with good teachers. Well the teacher's salary might be the same as any other school, but the quality of your teachers came at the expense of the quality of teaching in other schools.
Tl;dr - Romania, like other Eastern European states, uses "tracking" or separate educational streams, so students from "National Colleges" (the top tier of Romanian high schools) tend to be overrepresented.
> The design of Romania’s educational system makes it perhaps the most stratified educational system in the world
> One of the cruel parts of the Romanian system is that, though sorting is nationally available, students do not have equal opportunities to sort. Students located in smaller towns have fewer high school options to select from unless they’re among the few who opt into a military academy, which means joining the military
> This combined sorting between schools and tracks means that low-ability students get stuck with other low-ability students, and high-ability students are surrounded by other high-ability students. In effect, peer groups throughout high school are extremely homogeneous.
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While this is good for identifying talent for Olympiads, it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole. Neighboring Poland doesn't have the same level of tracking in it's educational system and has much stronger human capital based on HDI compared to Romania, despite both being roughly comparable to each other in the 1990s.
Human capital isn't developed by having a minority of students becoming the cream of the crop, it comes by helping all students get the option or ability to rise to the academic level at which they can succeed irrespective of geographic location (small town vs city), ethnicity, or economic class.
Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.
And anecdotally at least, I went to HS and college with a decent number of national and international Olympiad winners (one of whom was both a IMO and IPhO team member concurrently), and while they did decent in life (some HFT, mostly academia) it wasn't much different of an outcome compared to our peers who didn't partake in those olympiads.
This shouldn't dissuade people from doing Olympiads if they wish, but targeting Olympiad success for the sake of Olympiad success seems toxic and a waste of resources.
Edit: cannot reply
> Cyberax
I am not opposed to students participating in Olympiads od they chose so with full autonomy and independence, just like I am not opposed to students who want to do well in sports because they like sports.
If you are forcing your kid to be a tier 1 quarterback OR a IMO participant, you aren't making them a well rounded student.
And if you as a society make "being a football player" or "being a topper" the primary goal, you aren't actually identifying new talent, because the only way to rise to the top in a field is if you have an actual aptitude AND interest.
There's a reason why China and India are seeing significant social opposition from younger generations about "test driven" and "rote" culture, the same way plenty of boomer nerds on HN who grew up in the 80s and 90s were probably ostracized for not being into football (idk - I wasn't around for much of the 90s, I'm subsisting of pop culture from that era like Daria)
> it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole.
it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?
I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.
> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.
Path to FyzTech lies through FMSHs which accept high school students largely via regional-level Olympiads. And path to that lies through the Olympiad "circle" in your local school.
You probably can build a stratified education system without Olympiads, but as a matter of fact in Russia they do actually play an important role in the overall structure.
I don’t necessarily see a problem with enabling like talented groups to be mingled together, that said it depends on the metrics. A friend who had a 3.2 in HS did way better in life than several 4.0+ students.
The other end of the spectrum is the way most of the US handles high school. Long gone are gifted and talented programs before high school and in many cases, for instance those with an ability for math are stuck in classes with those that will top out before algebra.
I understand your point, but the catering to the mediocre that happens these days in US grade schools isn’t the right answer either.
The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds and legitimately don't have a strong predictive capacity on student success that couldn't already be explained the parental background and early childhood care.
In my case, I never placed in gifted academic programs in elementary and middle, but by HS was able to take 14 AP classes (and auto shop - always liked tinkering since elementary school; which was a major reason why I never placed well in gifted programs) and end up at HYS. Most of my peers there similarly didn't attended gifted programs or high schools - amongst the non-legacies the biggest predictor of success was SAT scores and GPA.
While giving and funding academic and gifted tracks within schools should be allowed, "gifted" students should not be segregated from "normal" students. There's no reason a high school can't both offer as many AP classes as possible ALONG with vocational classes.
Edit: can't reply
> Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools
It's not that they need more funding. The issue is gifted programs tend to overlap with upper income families [0] - the same kinds of families that are overrepresented in School Boards and PTAs [1]
I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0", but recognize that gifted only schools does lead to a moral perception that other students are not as deserving for funding or are "bad students".
> the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding
But are overrepresented in urban areas where human capital is significantly higher than rural areas within Romania [2]. Students in rural and small town schools are less liked to be as healthy or a affluent as students in cities or major urban centers, and this does have a tangible downstream effect on education as a whole.
Note how I said << I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0" >>
There is a happy middle ground between being an exclusionary system like Romania's or a delusional bussed system like San Francisco.
Giving the example of a city with a population the size of Cincinnati is clearly a facile argument, as it is obviously not representative of the rest of California, let alone the US.
That is a lot to read. I’m no longer in my 40s. Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school.
Sadly education has evolved where schools teach to the norm rather than acknowledging people have different strengths and weaknesses.
It does not require separate schools, it needs funding and more importantly, someone good at math needs to be able to work with others good at math.
The educational curriculum in the US for grade school has been standardized to the mediocre and any attempt to encourage gifted is considered a problem.
Give students the ability to test out of classes and/or dual enroll in community colleges, BUT make sure they are all still in the same school meeting and greeting and bumping into each other.
Dumbing down curricula is a bad move, and preventing students from being able to test out or take classes earlier is also a bad move. But segregating students into different schools based on academic ability is equally as bad.
> Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school
Yep. This is a model I agree with, and am a product of as well being a fellow Bay Area native
The funny thing, I went to five schools, 3 different districts across Bay Area cities. All had accommodations for different levels. High school, I ended up at UCSC my freshman year with enough credits from transfer in (from high school school) and my first quarter as a junior. Most were community college courses friends and I were interested in separate from school.
My step daughter, I hear her curriculum and shake my head (my BS was in computer engineering and computational chemistry), I could not help with the bs “common core” forced on her.
Thankfully she settled into the ability to have college courses in her last year.
It’s ridiculous how much of a push there is “standardizing” the skills of individuals. When their strengths should be encouraged.
Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools? I would imagine "problematic children schools" would need the most funds because you would need the lowest teacher:student ratio to maintain order
> The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds
No, they don't. If you look at SF, the high-performing Lowell High gets a bit _less_ funding than the average for the district. Stuyvesant in NYC is right at the average spending.
I studied in a magnet school with other gifted kids, including a future Olympiad winner. Our school barely had heating in winter. It's really the _other_ kids that make all the difference.
> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.
First, if you remove the Olympiad-based admission, there's no guarantee that these students could _get_ into the top-level universities.
Second, people in the US _love_ to point out that athletics "builds the character" and sets people up for success later in life. Well, do you think that training for Olympiads and competing in high-stakes academic tournaments also does nothing?
Yep, but the distance between both isn't significant both physically and culturally.
> What's HDI
Human Development Index - it's a composite index that combines health, education, and economic indicators in a quick benchmark to compare relatively human capital development.
You get excellence in a tiny number of individuals who don't budge the statistics. The national averages are poor, and the excelling individuals are not even numerous enough to create a "fat right tail".
Scientific and technological breakthroughs are created by the few. Always been, always will be. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people are responsible for the current AI breakthroughs for instance, and I’m being conservative. You don’t need a fat right tail to completely change your country; of course, most of your tiny number of excellent individuals leaving for richer countries is a different problem altogether.
You do realize that if you go by "national averages" American math education is pretty bad right? People aren't leaving for countries with great national average in math. That's basically irrelevant.
IMHO there should be challenges but also opportunities for self correction and movement. The problem with test score stratification is that you start treating kids as unchanging objects being measured by an infallible yardstick, when neither assumption is true.
It's not racism it's essentialism and poor education. An ideal educational system would tailor material and projects to an individual student and adjust at the rate they improve.
This is a BS saying because it's so easy to find counterexamples.
Let's try to use the number of child deaths, for example. By your saying, trying to do that is bad. Because governments probably will somehow resurrect dead children to look good at this metric. Right?
Look at what France, Japan, and USA consider childhood deaths. Back when I did medical software and wrote reports, France and Japan both lumped at lot of deaths post birth into 'death at birth' to lower their childhood death statistics.
I would like to point out for context that the author, Jordan Lasker, is a eugenist derided for shoddy science, falsely using university affiliations, and racist commentary.
I do not write this to contradict particular claims in the article above, but @cremieux should be read cautiously.
He should also be derided for terrible writing. It's not until the 24th paragraph (of 30 total) that we encounter something resembling a thesis.
> With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads.
This could have been much shorter, but then the reader might notice the abject lack of supporting evidence for these central claims. I don't blame the author for burying them at the end.
I have no idea about author's background or about his other writings, but the conclusion quoted by you seems absolutely correct.
I do not understand why you say that it lacks supporting evidence.
Before this conclusion, the author has explained the system of national exams and of distribution into high schools and inside high schools, that ensures that the best students are grouped together and also that the best teachers are assigned to them.
There is no doubt that even if the average level of education is bad, this system guarantees that the best become very good and much better than students with similar native qualities who have stayed in high school in the middle of less capable colleagues, while being not taught things deemed too difficult for the general population. Moreover, the author has mentioned that the state provides rewards for good results at the International Olympiads, both for teachers and for students.
I do not see what more evidence could be brought. In my opinion the conclusion of the author is well supported and it explains why these students compete successfully against students from much bigger countries.
So talking about eugenics in a positive way equals racist commentary?
I have a genetic mutation (de novo) that leads to a disability and that I don't want to pass on. Natural approach: Die, due to the lack of therapeutic modalities. No chance of offspring. With the help of medicine, I am alive. Now, to prevent passing on mutated genes but still have children, I could use something like IVF and reproductive genetics. This is textbook eugenics(?)
Obviously I disapprove of the stereotypical eugenics of the century. Ranging from Germans murdering disabled children to Danes forcing Greenland women on birth control.
This definitely adds a grain of salt, but as far as I can tell, none of that shows in the article, especially in the final paragraphs explaining how the elitist system is overall bad for the country. But it does make me wonder about possible hidden flaws in the methodology (I'm still confused at some of the earlier statistics contradicting the claims made later)
> Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews and using them as an explanation is problematic for two reasons. The first is that there are too few to realistically explain Romanian Olympiad performance. The second is that we know the identities of Olympiad participants from Romania, and they don’t seem to be Jewish.
This struck me as…odd…before I even saw the parent comment.
This one is not odd and was worth mentioning before rejecting. Just look at American IMO team of 2024, in which most team members have Asian ancestry - some ethnic groups may indeed perform better than others. Picking Jews for this matter wasn’t unreasonable if you know the history of Eastern Europe.
The general vibe of this magazine: support mainstreaming of eugenics ideas (and now eigenicists), the ubermensch / great man theory of history, and other ideas that we’ve largely shied away from for the last 75 years.
Sure, but knowing the intention and bias of the author is sometimes more important than other times. For example, it doesn’t really matter what the bias is of the person giving you the weather report; the weather either is or isn’t accurate, based on the data.
The author of an article about how an education system is or should be structured, however, very much matters.
"With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads."
A better question is: "Why should country X perform well in international Olympiads"?
It is just entertainment. It doesn't have any meaningful, deep or relevant impact on culture and quality of life of a country. At best it boost narcissistic jingoism and nationalism.
Life in a country won't get any better because someone that carries their flag appeared on television winning a medal. This is just a globalized version of the Roman "panis et circensis", but without the panis.
This magazine regularly publishes neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).
They’ve recently toned things down a bit, but it’s hard not to notice this vibe once you see it.
> neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).
I like how you imply that celebrating the space program, the Age of Discovery and math Olympiads is neo-fascist. Tells a lot about what neo-fascism apparently is.
I noticed this phenomenon several years ago and came to the following conclusions: Romania is strongly multi-ethnic. Germans from Saxony and Swabia immigrated to Transylvania 800 years ago. A thousand years ago, people from northern India immigrated, whom we now know as Gypsies and who make up 8-10% of the population. In the south, the country was besieged by the Ottomans/Turks for 400 years. The cognitive differences between these ethnic groups are enormous.
Some time ago, I asked ChatGPT to find the winners of the Math Olympiads, their schools, and their places of birth. Most of the Olympiad winners attended elite schools in Bucharest, with few math participants coming from the south of the country and no participants who could be classified as Gypsies. But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.
In 2023, for example, a computer science Olympiad participant from Orăștie (Hunedoara County) won a silver medal. Orăștie is located in Transylvania and historically had a Saxon community. Brașov (Kronstadt) also recently produced medal winners: in 2025, a student from the Meșotă College in Brașov won silver at the Chemistry Olympiad. Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg) also appears on the list – a student from the Bălcescu Lyceum there won silver at the Linguistics Olympiad in 2024. Timișoara (Temeswar)—also a western city with German history—was represented by a student (Carmen Sylva College) with an Honorable Mention in linguistics. These examples support the thesis that educational centers in the former Habsburg regions produce above-average talent.
Is there any further information about the ethnic origin of the Science Olympiad participants? I would be grateful for any information (even if it does not confirm the thesis).
Absolutely. That whole region (let's say Balkans+) has several different groups of people who are very different culturally and ethnically. And for some reason the press would blame whole countries for the crimes of specific minority groups. "Bulgarian gangs stealing cars", "Romanian gangs exploiting the UK benefits system", and so on.
I lost count of how many times I had to clarify to friends and family: "No, that's not representative of that country at all. I have friends and coworkers from there who are very well educated, hard workers, and good people. And you couldn't tell them apart from the rest of Europeans. Many of them won math/programming competitions and are smarter than me."
While most companies have a negative image of those countries due to media portrayals, investment banks in London figured it out so they fly whole recruiting teams there to hire graduates, _every year_. Some Big Tech companies figured this out, too. I've seen it first hand.
When people say groups are different, such as one ethnic group from another, they are looking at averages. It has very little relevance to looking at the top performers in a field. Each country only brings six people to IMO.
I disagree that there are cognitive differences between large ethnicities of people. Almost always, what we attribute as cognitive differences is differences in opportunity and societal power structures
As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.
The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.
I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.
There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).
Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.
However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.
I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters.
But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.
I can only agree. Higher education for the mass is dangerous, especially when there are not enough jobs for them and they have to take a heavy loan to finance their education.
Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa...
I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.
Elite overproduction is an interesting topic and putting aside any suggestion that it's a precise mathematical predictor, it obviously creates societal problems.
That is - you've created a large class of intelligent achievers with nothing for them to do. Arguably that just naturally produces increasing societal upheaval. Whether that means revolution or just chaotic increasingly populist elections is a matter of degrees.
Nevermind the lack of data - what even would be the limits of knowledge in such a model? If it was widely believed that society will collapse at some point in the next 30 years, how would human behavior change in response? How would that affect the original prediction?
If only someone would devise a Foundation to look into this
> Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites).
I know i will get downvoted for this but i feel HN is losing its intellectual side over such elitist crap more and more. The original article is from a well-known racist / eugenist and people here keep going on posting more dubious content that tries to paint towards political policies to keep the masses out of higher education.
Oversupply ov elites has been a major factor of political and social progress so far.
If you keep the masses intentionally dumb, then it makes sense to do the next step and also ban them from voting. And imagine to what kind of society this is leading.
Actually, voting is an excellent way to keep power away from the masses. A dictatorship has to constantly be aware of its approval ratings, whereas a parliament can ignore them for 3-4 years at a time.
I do not have the impression that any politician who is not about to retire, does not care about approval ratings. There is more to democracy, than voting once every 4 years.
I disagree. Improving education for everyone reduces the barrier for cross domain improvements to occur. An artist who may need some technical knowledge to realize a vision would not be able to do so if the basis of that knowledge was barred through inherent passion. It also provides the long term basis for startup and business creation, which is precisely the actual solution to elite overproduction.
One challenge in this is how to prevent permanent alienation between the masses & high achievers where you separate them at increasingly earlier points of life.
I went to school in a small town where I still shared some non-core classes with the masses, and only had separate tracks for some science/math courses starting at say 13 or 14 years old. But I still had gym/art/homeroom/etc with the masses right until graduation at 18 years old.
The trend has of course been to split the smarter kids out at younger and younger ages.. you see completely separate smart kids schools starting at 14 or 11 years old. You hear stories of pre-K and kindergarten programs that require your kid test in, as if they can asses the intelligence of a 3 year old.
As a society I would observe it makes the masses more resentful & distrusting towards "the elites" and "the elites" more oblivious to what the life for 99% of the country actually entails.
Unfortunately, in my class of students, being good at solving Olympiad level questions did not turn out to be a good predictor of their contributions to society.
What is more important, raising next generation of Musks (albeit ideally much less broken sociopathic piece of shit as current one), or avoiding next generation of Trumps?
Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.
So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.
So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.
The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting/engaging teachers and tutors imaginable, and they're still just not going to excel.
And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.
And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.
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I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.
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Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou...
People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.
In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.
They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.
I would be willing to bet intelligence is a much larger deciding factor in grades than interest is. Most people I know who got top grades had barely any interest in many of the subjects
People are different but the demands of 99% of actual jobs are far below that those natural differences won't matter as opposed to standardized training.
And it's a good thing that it's like that, because we don't want our society to be reliant on a few Rockstars. As Napoleon stated, an individual Mamluk far exceeded an individual Frenchman, but 1000 Frenchman could always defeat 1000 Mamluks.
Here's one issue. Romania has a really lousy motorway system, what there is of it. I gather that corruption has much to do with this apart from construction difficulties involving the Carpathians. As an example there isn't even a motorway between Bucharest and Brasov (88 miles or 141 km apart), the latter being a favorite destination for tourists and wealthy and not-so wealthy second home owners alike. The trip by car either way is usually a nightmare. I should add that Brasov is one of the major towns of Romania not just a tourist attraction.
To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.
A fun fact surprisingly not mentioned in the article, and which I thought would be topical at this time, is that the Romanians apparently love their math olympiads so much that they recently elected as their president an International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) medalist. The current president Nicușor Dan had perfect scores at the IMO both times he participated (one of only 12 students so far with a perfect score in each of their ≥2 participations [1]). In fact at IMO 1988 he was one of only 11 students who solved the famous/notorious “Vieta jumping” problem [2], which eluded even Terence Tao (who, to be fair, was participating at only 13 years old!).
The Wikipedia section of “Notable [IMO] participants” has three sections: “Mathematicians”, “Computer scientists”, and “Other”, with Dan being the sole entry in the last one. :) [3]
[1]: http://imo-official.org/hall.aspx?column=perfectscores&order...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vieta_jumping&old...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Internati...
Sure, but that's not why he was elected president. Well, not directly.
His Olympiad results led to him getting a doctorate at Sorbonne, which led to him speaking french, which led to impressing Macron who threw France's weight into supporting Dan.
It was a power move to replace the German influence with French influence (previous praesident was ethnic German)
That's a really naive and wrong take.
He is popular, he was elected mayor of Bucharest.
He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR)
He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages)
He is religious as well (pretty important aparently)
All his opponents were much less competent.
A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the counter candidate is worse (because of iliescu and corruptiob)
The AUR candidate really is a russian puppet and not that smart either, he's mostly there for the 30% vote extremists always get and which were taken by georgescu first time. It's a shame he got far and shows how much influence external actors can have over facebook/tiktok etc.
The USR candidate that managed to squeeze through first time has no charisma and was a backup since Nicusor refused the first time...
So what else is left?
Germany and France are fairly aligned these days, no big deal :>
Tell that to the people involved in or suffering from the power struggles regarding FCAS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Combat_Air_System ).
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., it seems that many neighbouring countries who had similar schooling systems perform similarly or better "per capita" (Hungary with <10M people, placed 5th; Romania 19M at 6th; Bulgaria with <7M at 8th; Serbia at 30th with <8M, Croatia at 42nd with <5M people — two of which should probably get some share of Yugoslavia's medals at 39th — there's also Serbia and Montenegro separately).
So, Romania is at the sweet spot of high selectivity and population size to really pop out in these types of competitions, but it seem it's not really that unique as it's being suggested.
There are many factors - most of them economic and cultural - but it all starts with an intense maths syllabus in school, Soviet Union style. Here's the current one for 5th to 8th grade: https://www.scribd.com/document/184259748/The-Romanian-Maths...
Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.
That is roughly equivalent to what I did in honors math in the 90s in the US.
Looking over the math curriculum in the same school district today, the current level of instruction doesn't even come close. Standards have sadly fallen.
School in Romania in the 90s was way harder than it is now. Standards have dropped (a lot) here as well.
My grade school education in the US was similar to this (although you needed to qualify for "accelerated" math). There were maybe 90 people every year in this. Those who did well did not make it much past CML or AMC, maybe out of lack of interest. You had to be excellent to move on to Olympiad level maths.
Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.
Having seen what children are capable of, it’s neither overwhelming nor brutal.
What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content. We live in what could be a golden age of thought but for the average kid it’s anything but.
I have to agree with you. Children are adaptable and will rise to the challenge. The west too often prefers to think children are capable of nothing, and have them wallow in an intellectual void.
While I think the west is a huge generalization, I don't think the west thinks children are capable of nothing. It's more about letting children be children and play. Rather than forcing them to "work" almost constantly from a very young age.
I don't really envy the school systems that force kids to work very hard from an early age to get into a fancy university. From what I understand it's usually school systems with a heavy focus on rote memorization as well and that takes up quite a bit of time with diminishing results.
Having been through a post-Soviet school system, it's not about rote memorization, at least not in maths. The point is spending as much time with a problem as necessarily, without having a predefined algorithm, until it cracks. It's such a useful skill and satisfying experience that I feel sad that some children are denied it for the sake of psychological comfort.
It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down.
It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can just heat up some tendies?
Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.
> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved.
It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.
This level of generalization and certainty shouted down from the moral high ground is the hallmark of a great comment!
> It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries.
I’m 42 years old and something like this was already said about kids when I was a child (I suspect it was like that before my time as well). Children’s palate develops with age and so does their taste.
> What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content
Both of these things are droning. One is just culturally acceptable. Don't think so? Stop by your local Kumon center some time.
"Because Romania is a member state of the European Union, the people the country has put great effort into training and credentialing are easily able to leave the country and acquire jobs elsewhere" and "free movement of talent between countries, Romania ends up subsidizing talent discovery for other countries with less apt educational systems" Are pretty negative stances. UE is a union, so it's a pretty different situation than students leaving eg third world country to come to Europe. And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. I hope such phenomenon progressively average the situation between UE countries and closes the gaps that may currently exist.
The EU echoes the SU, sadly. Central government, central planning, central banks, mix people, no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities, flatten the social structures, and most importantly, destroy the family unit. Young couples can't buy a house and can't afford to raise kids. And young Europeans face high unemployment and low wages for life-consuming jobs with not much career prospects.
Remote work would've lessen that. But it seems they didn't like it so they quickly rolled it back after the pandemic.
I believe the original intent of such Olympiads was to test how pupils equipped with only standard school education would tackle non-standard puzzles. Eventually this turned into pupils attending special schools, having coaches, doing such non-standrdad puzzles all day long during their studies in order to win medals. A leetcode grind all the way down.
I think it's the other way round. There were special schools or special groups in regular schools that prepared Soviet children to STEM careers by making them solve a lot of puzzles. Then IMO appeared on top of that to celebrate highest achievers
Just like the physical Olympiads :)
The Olympics were originally founded on the principle of amateurism, on grassroots, individual passion and love of the sport, not as a career or life achievement.
To see what's its become today, especially how some suffer greatly to get the gold medal is depressing, if not disgusting when all of this are ultimately trivial activities. They were supposed to be a unifying reprieve from the real issues of the 20th century, not another stage of brutal national competition.
Thought the physical Olympics were a bit older than the 20th century. By about 2700 years.
This!
I have to say:
After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...
I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
Well, a lot of countries aren't worth leaving. Taking my home of the UK as an example, Wikipedia lists 19 countries with higher GDP per capita, but if I don't want to learn a new language, overcome bureaucratic obstacles and leave my family behind, there is nowhere to go and this criteria describes almost everybody who gets an education here, even the smart ones. Romania is #53 on the list and their EU membership means they can emigrate easily.
I'm pretty sure there is a mass exodus of British Nurses to Australia.. And for tech or finance, America is the dream...
The education system is stratified, keeping high-achieving students together, promoting them to schools with good teachers, etc.
OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?
It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
I wonder if national averages actually matter very much beyond being a vanity statistic? While it's good to have a generally more mathematically capable population, you would expect most actual "progress" (papers, discoveries, things built) to be made by the outliers.
I guess there's another layer tho in 2025 where, assuming they are rational, you wouldn't necessarily expect their efforts to benefit Romania.
In a global economy I think a good national average is more important than the peaks. The genius invention will spread, and there is significant value in having a population which can utilise it.
As another example, if cancer is cured tomorrow it won't necessarily be the country which found the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most competent doctors, able to use and apply the cure.
I would first caution against reducing education to the practical and the economic. Education is much more, and much more important, that just that.
Second, I would caution against the trope that invention is some exclusive province of the "genius".
That out of the way, we can look to network effects. Consider that a populace with high literacy will permit more of the kind of collaboration that has literacy as a prerequisite, while one with low literacy and a few outliers won't. The outliers are constrained in how much they can collaborate, and collaboration is essential to scientific and economic development.
Yes, a numerate population as assessed by national averages matters. A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely. Numeracy is closely tied to the ability to work in a variety of occupations. If we consider probability and statistics, the implications are especially salient.
>A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely.
People with good STEM education, even with PhDs in that field aren’t necessarily competent voters and good decision makers outside of area of their interests. Understanding economic policies is still an effort that many aren’t willing to take.
This seems to me more like a reasonable hypothesis than a foregone conclusion.
Personally I suspect there's a floor (can read a chart, understands growth rates and compounding in general) which the public need to assess arguments constructed by specialists, while the rest is mostly understanding ideology.
The reason I believe that is, I think I can pretty much predict 100% of the conclusion of most articles written for the public by knowing the names & affiliations of the authors and the topic. The only uncertainty is what sources and statistics they will pick to reach the conclusion required by their ideology.
A numerate and literate population matters for many reasons, but in theory it’s possible to field a strong team for the Olympiad despite an abysmal national average literacy level. Just look at North Korea for example. They’ve got a “fat right tail” of sophisticated hackers but on average their literacy is terrible.
Idiot author aside, even if the students were outliers being sent to the Olympiad, that would not explain the consistent performance over decades. Relative to the size of the country, and compared to the other dominant nations, the outliers seem disproportionate.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., there are smaller countries performing better (Hungary, Bulgaria, for instance) and similarly as well.
> The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
This is the usual argument against stratified education systems but is it proven in any way? My experience with stratified systems is that they increase both high quantiles and the average. Maybe (even if not established), maybe they reduce low quantiles like the 0.1th, but very unlikely they damage the average. Quite the opposite.
It's kind of like this idea that communism makes an average citizen richer which sounds logical, but in the end everyone's poorer. Remove the stratification and there's no incentive to do anything.
> is it proven in any way?
The figure in the article claims to show that this is indeed the case -- though as I noted in my other comments, the y axis is actually uninterpretable ("percentiles" can't be negative).
Author aside I thought this was a very interesting answer to a question I didn't know I had.
I had been thinking that sending my children to a school with high achievers could leave her at a relative disadvantage but this data would seem to say otherwise.
I wonder if this conflicts with Malcolm Gladwell's observations on one's relative ranking when it comes to college matriculation (that its more important to be at a high percentile of your institution than your global rank)
One of the unintended but hard to avoid consequences of a high competition education environment is a lot of broken kids. Dealing with constant pressure and failure is hard even for adults, for some children it's literally fatal. Don't forget to consider this as well
After looking into the author a bit. Ugh
What is the answer that you found? All I see is a marginally defensible claim in the 24th paragraph. I stopped reading after that, although there were only a few paragraphs left.
Bulgaria has been performing pretty well despite of the declining quality of education, which was stellar during Communism. Nobody was pushing us to advance in Math and Science; there was just nothing better to do. I wish these times could come back. Right now, kids are faced with all kinds of distractions and little incentive to go into studying seriously.
Actually, throughout Eastern Europe, there was an excellent math and science curriculum during the socialist era. Despite all the negatives of this system, the good education was one of the huge positives. In the last 30 years in Bulgaria, there has been a significant decline, but some good traditions are still maintained, at least in the elite schools.
Hungarian jews are also extremely smart anecdotally.
> Since 2020, Romania’s performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) has been nothing short of amazing. In 2022, Romania came in fifth overall, fourth in 2023, and twelfth in 2024.
Here's how those three years compare to surrounding years:
(Update: See note at the end with more years)I'm not sure much can be read into this. The participants are usually high school students, and the top contestants from a given country usually participate in multiple years, and each country's team had 6 contestants.
It only takes getting a two or three outstanding students for a country to shoot significantly up for a couple years or so, depending on how close in age those students are.
For the 3 years the article mentions, 2022-2024, Romania had 2 people who were there all 3 years, 5 people who were there for 2 of the 3 years, and only 2 people who were only there for 1 year.
The 2023 team had 5 people from 2022. For 2024 half the 2023 team was replaced.
Looking at several years of their teams and individual performances it looks like they regularly have people who do well. A lot of people place in ranked 150+ one year, then shoot way up in the next year or next two, and then drop way down again.
For example they had a guy who 2018-2020 ranked 174, 15, 4. But they didn't in those last two years have anyone else also peaking.
In 2021-2024 they had a guy who went 143, 32, 1, 82.
In 2021-2023 they had a guy who went 319, 23, 46.
In 2017-2025 all the years except 2022-2024 had 2 people in the top 100. 2022 and 2023 had all 6 in the top 100, and 2024 had 3 in the top 100.
Looking at all this 2022-2024 plausibly could be explained as just a matter of timing. They seem to always have some people who are good enough to get a high score at least once. Some do it their first year and then don't participate any more. Some participate multiple times but only hit that high once. A smaller number hit multiple highs.
With just a small change in the timing of when some of these people appear or when they hit their peaks, so that they happen at the same time instead of missing each other by a small number of years, many of those other teams could before 2022 could have been top 10 teams.
Update: here is Romania's rank going backwards from 2025 to 1979:
It looks like they did very well in the IMP during their last decade of Communism (which ended there in 1989, and also for the decade after that.For the next 10 years they fell off a little. It was during this time (2003 specifically) that they started using a national test to assign people to high schools.
The decade after that fell off a little more. It was at the start of that decade (2010) that they switched to the Evaluarea Națională mentioned in the article.
This is a very interesting topic and the article seems quite thorough. But I have trouble interpreting the crucial "School and track sorting can bolster or bust academic achievement" plots: The y axis is labelled "Graduation score percentile", but it has negative numbers on the scale. How are these values being corrected?
The series for 1-school towns on the left plot is basically flat; am I supposed to believe that, in such towns, students entering the school with a 0.5 on the high school admission test appear at the same exit exam percentile (implying that they have the same average exit exam scores) as those who entered with a 9.5? That can't possibly be true.
ETA: I also thought the conclusion -- that other countries should adopt a similar education model -- was out of step with most of the body text, which seemed to stress the downsides for weaker students. (There's no actual contradiction here, and perhaps the claim about most of society's advances being due to the top-end achievers was intended to justify this angle, but I was nevertheless surprised that there wasn't much discussion of why this upside should overpower the concerns for weaker students.)
It says "effect" of school sorting. So the "graduation score percentile" must be the change in percentile due to school sorting.
That seems plausible, but change with respect to what baseline? I think the sensible baseline would be the entry exam percentile (x axis), but others are conceivable.
> That can't possibly be true
It tracks with spatial inequality.
A 1 school town is highly likely to be a small rural town with limited economic prospects. Like plenty of CEE countries, the overwhelming majority of opportunities have historically been clustered in the capital and a couple regional cities.
The kind of town or village with only a single school is going to have fewer social benefits or services compared to an urban school.
Basically, what it is saying is students in those kinds of towns are s** out of luck statistically speaking compared to their urban peers.
There's a reason Romania's HDI has remained lower than Russia's until recently thanks to EU funding to help develop Romania (which is now on track to become a major economic pole in the CEE)
Edit: can't reply
> A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)
I recommend checking it out. It explains the methodology and some potential wonkiness. It's always good to read the docs
I acknowledge that effect is present, but it's simply not strong enough to dominate natural variation in ability (for which high school entrance exam scores are a proxy) to the point where the results are completely flat -- in fact, students who achieved the highest scores on the entrance exam were slightly lower in exit scores on average than those with low or medium entrance scores!
What this tells me is that some kind of correction is being applied to those y values (we already know this because of negatives numbers on a "percentile" axis) -- but what?
A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)
The author is Jordan Lasker (also known by internet handle Crémieux). Much of Lasker's work and commentary focuses on race and IQ, and he has promoted eugenics. On X and Substack, Lasker is known for compiling charts on what he calls the "Black-White IQ gap"
The way he investigates how many of the winners from Romania are "Jews" (because apparently you can tell that by looking at their name and picture or whatever) is also very sus.
Are his arguments sound, though?
The problem with all IQ and race correlations is that you can never actually remove the effects of prenatal and childhood nutrition, socioeconomic differences, quality of education etc. Indeed, if you stabilize them, the differences go away. And that's still saying nothing of the culture-neutrality of IQ tests themselves.
In the middle ages, theologians had sound arguments for how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Then their arguments must have stood the test of time, good for them! More likely, their arguments weren't ever sound at all.
Sound arguments from faulty premises are still sound arguments – but identifying whether premises are valid is hard. (My heuristic, "if a sound argument concludes that racism is true, there's something wrong with the premises", is pretty effective in telling me where to look, but doesn't eliminate the hard work of distinguishing truth from falsehood.)
I think Poland is in very similar spot, often punching above its weight in software and math. My own amateur explanation is that Polish language is pretty complex and very particular about correct words and word forms. So Polish kids get a good training in keeping track of details of notations just by learning their native language.
And then there is China - remember that IOI for instance accepts 4 people from each country.
After all it all comes down to individuals. In Poland, there is famous informatics high school teacher who is credited for producing most IOI/IOM medalist per high school pupil in the world I believe.
They have special training program there. Another thing is to actually find geniuses, obviously. And if you don’t believe in geniuses, meet Jake - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OR36jrx_L44
For example, Jakub Pachocki (director of engineering of OpenAI) who graduated this high school, actually was on the verge of getting F from maths in his previous high school, because of problems being to easy I believe. Then they made the transfer where he could finally thrive. Interestingly, he wanted to do phd in 2 years in University of Warsaw, but people there didn’t want to allow it just because so they lost him - he went to do his PhD at Carnegie Mellon.
To summarise, from what I understand formula would be something like genius + great, inspiring and allowing teacher(s) + special personalised teaching programs + supportive environment.
Also don’t assume that these outliers are testament to the level of education of general population.
Romania is wasting taxpayer money to groom bright students and then let them leave Romania for some higher GDP country
That's a problem with the opportunity in the country rather with the schools. Being able to produce exceptional students is an advantage, now figure out how to make them stay.
The usual calculus here is that they don't capture ALL the upside of that training, but they capture plenty of it.
I would downvote you, but I won't, and instead I will leave a reply.
I was one of those students who left. Romania did not waste any more taxpayer money on me than on other students, and that money that it spent was really meager by any Western standards.
My kids now go to public school in NYC. The city spends north of $30k for each of them [1]. Yet, if they decide to leave the US nobody will complain that they were groomed with precious taxpayer money, and they betrayed the trust placed in them. It is understood that every person has the right pursue their own happiness the best way they can.
[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-sch...
I'm assuming you went to a good school in Romania, with good teachers. Well the teacher's salary might be the same as any other school, but the quality of your teachers came at the expense of the quality of teaching in other schools.
În general, SUA nu are o problemă de "brain drain"
If they did, I'm sure you'd hear this complaint a lot more.
USA wastes 1076x more money and us that have to live here could only hope most US-educated kids would please go elsewhere :)
Tl;dr - Romania, like other Eastern European states, uses "tracking" or separate educational streams, so students from "National Colleges" (the top tier of Romanian high schools) tend to be overrepresented.
> The design of Romania’s educational system makes it perhaps the most stratified educational system in the world
> One of the cruel parts of the Romanian system is that, though sorting is nationally available, students do not have equal opportunities to sort. Students located in smaller towns have fewer high school options to select from unless they’re among the few who opt into a military academy, which means joining the military
> This combined sorting between schools and tracks means that low-ability students get stuck with other low-ability students, and high-ability students are surrounded by other high-ability students. In effect, peer groups throughout high school are extremely homogeneous.
----------
While this is good for identifying talent for Olympiads, it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole. Neighboring Poland doesn't have the same level of tracking in it's educational system and has much stronger human capital based on HDI compared to Romania, despite both being roughly comparable to each other in the 1990s.
Human capital isn't developed by having a minority of students becoming the cream of the crop, it comes by helping all students get the option or ability to rise to the academic level at which they can succeed irrespective of geographic location (small town vs city), ethnicity, or economic class.
Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.
And anecdotally at least, I went to HS and college with a decent number of national and international Olympiad winners (one of whom was both a IMO and IPhO team member concurrently), and while they did decent in life (some HFT, mostly academia) it wasn't much different of an outcome compared to our peers who didn't partake in those olympiads.
This shouldn't dissuade people from doing Olympiads if they wish, but targeting Olympiad success for the sake of Olympiad success seems toxic and a waste of resources.
Edit: cannot reply
> Cyberax
I am not opposed to students participating in Olympiads od they chose so with full autonomy and independence, just like I am not opposed to students who want to do well in sports because they like sports.
If you are forcing your kid to be a tier 1 quarterback OR a IMO participant, you aren't making them a well rounded student.
And if you as a society make "being a football player" or "being a topper" the primary goal, you aren't actually identifying new talent, because the only way to rise to the top in a field is if you have an actual aptitude AND interest.
There's a reason why China and India are seeing significant social opposition from younger generations about "test driven" and "rote" culture, the same way plenty of boomer nerds on HN who grew up in the 80s and 90s were probably ostracized for not being into football (idk - I wasn't around for much of the 90s, I'm subsisting of pop culture from that era like Daria)
> it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole.
it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?
I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.
> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.
Path to FyzTech lies through FMSHs which accept high school students largely via regional-level Olympiads. And path to that lies through the Olympiad "circle" in your local school.
You probably can build a stratified education system without Olympiads, but as a matter of fact in Russia they do actually play an important role in the overall structure.
I don’t necessarily see a problem with enabling like talented groups to be mingled together, that said it depends on the metrics. A friend who had a 3.2 in HS did way better in life than several 4.0+ students.
The other end of the spectrum is the way most of the US handles high school. Long gone are gifted and talented programs before high school and in many cases, for instance those with an ability for math are stuck in classes with those that will top out before algebra.
I understand your point, but the catering to the mediocre that happens these days in US grade schools isn’t the right answer either.
The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds and legitimately don't have a strong predictive capacity on student success that couldn't already be explained the parental background and early childhood care.
In my case, I never placed in gifted academic programs in elementary and middle, but by HS was able to take 14 AP classes (and auto shop - always liked tinkering since elementary school; which was a major reason why I never placed well in gifted programs) and end up at HYS. Most of my peers there similarly didn't attended gifted programs or high schools - amongst the non-legacies the biggest predictor of success was SAT scores and GPA.
While giving and funding academic and gifted tracks within schools should be allowed, "gifted" students should not be segregated from "normal" students. There's no reason a high school can't both offer as many AP classes as possible ALONG with vocational classes.
Edit: can't reply
> Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools
It's not that they need more funding. The issue is gifted programs tend to overlap with upper income families [0] - the same kinds of families that are overrepresented in School Boards and PTAs [1]
I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0", but recognize that gifted only schools does lead to a moral perception that other students are not as deserving for funding or are "bad students".
[0] - https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2019/09/30/socioeconomic-status-...
[1] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584188180...
> the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding
But are overrepresented in urban areas where human capital is significantly higher than rural areas within Romania [2]. Students in rural and small town schools are less liked to be as healthy or a affluent as students in cities or major urban centers, and this does have a tangible downstream effect on education as a whole.
[2] - https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2021/06...
> If you look at SF...
Note how I said << I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0" >>
There is a happy middle ground between being an exclusionary system like Romania's or a delusional bussed system like San Francisco.
Giving the example of a city with a population the size of Cincinnati is clearly a facile argument, as it is obviously not representative of the rest of California, let alone the US.
That is a lot to read. I’m no longer in my 40s. Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school.
Sadly education has evolved where schools teach to the norm rather than acknowledging people have different strengths and weaknesses.
It does not require separate schools, it needs funding and more importantly, someone good at math needs to be able to work with others good at math.
The educational curriculum in the US for grade school has been standardized to the mediocre and any attempt to encourage gifted is considered a problem.
I agree with you!
Give students the ability to test out of classes and/or dual enroll in community colleges, BUT make sure they are all still in the same school meeting and greeting and bumping into each other.
Dumbing down curricula is a bad move, and preventing students from being able to test out or take classes earlier is also a bad move. But segregating students into different schools based on academic ability is equally as bad.
> Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school
Yep. This is a model I agree with, and am a product of as well being a fellow Bay Area native
The funny thing, I went to five schools, 3 different districts across Bay Area cities. All had accommodations for different levels. High school, I ended up at UCSC my freshman year with enough credits from transfer in (from high school school) and my first quarter as a junior. Most were community college courses friends and I were interested in separate from school.
My step daughter, I hear her curriculum and shake my head (my BS was in computer engineering and computational chemistry), I could not help with the bs “common core” forced on her.
Thankfully she settled into the ability to have college courses in her last year.
It’s ridiculous how much of a push there is “standardizing” the skills of individuals. When their strengths should be encouraged.
Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools? I would imagine "problematic children schools" would need the most funds because you would need the lowest teacher:student ratio to maintain order
> The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds
No, they don't. If you look at SF, the high-performing Lowell High gets a bit _less_ funding than the average for the district. Stuyvesant in NYC is right at the average spending.
I studied in a magnet school with other gifted kids, including a future Olympiad winner. Our school barely had heating in winter. It's really the _other_ kids that make all the difference.
>The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds
The article points out that the opposite is the case in Romania: the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding.
>Edit: cannot reply
What do you mean you cannot reply?
HN has limits on replies for threads that are popular, in order to prevent what it thinks is a back-and-forth flame war.
It can be overzealous at times.
Yes, but it does that by flagging and hiding the thread, not closing comments.
> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.
First, if you remove the Olympiad-based admission, there's no guarantee that these students could _get_ into the top-level universities.
Second, people in the US _love_ to point out that athletics "builds the character" and sets people up for success later in life. Well, do you think that training for Olympiads and competing in high-stakes academic tournaments also does nothing?
> Neighboring Poland
they aren't neighbors.
What's HDI ?
> they aren't neighbors
Lviv will always be Lwow in my heart /s
Yep, but the distance between both isn't significant both physically and culturally.
> What's HDI
Human Development Index - it's a composite index that combines health, education, and economic indicators in a quick benchmark to compare relatively human capital development.
Well, you set up a system that fosters competition, you get excellence as a result.
DUH.
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus also have similar systems, and they punch way above their weight in math and CS: https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=RUS https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=UKR https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=BLR
Ironically, the US schools do have tracking. For athletics.
The US absolutely _needs_ to have a school system that challenges students. No more nonsense about racist algebra.
You get excellence in a tiny number of individuals who don't budge the statistics. The national averages are poor, and the excelling individuals are not even numerous enough to create a "fat right tail".
Scientific and technological breakthroughs are created by the few. Always been, always will be. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people are responsible for the current AI breakthroughs for instance, and I’m being conservative. You don’t need a fat right tail to completely change your country; of course, most of your tiny number of excellent individuals leaving for richer countries is a different problem altogether.
No, it's the same problem. Nobody wants to live in a country where everyone is impoverished and illiterate.
You do realize that if you go by "national averages" American math education is pretty bad right? People aren't leaving for countries with great national average in math. That's basically irrelevant.
This is interesting if true, but without data I can't take this claim at face value.
IMHO there should be challenges but also opportunities for self correction and movement. The problem with test score stratification is that you start treating kids as unchanging objects being measured by an infallible yardstick, when neither assumption is true.
It's not racism it's essentialism and poor education. An ideal educational system would tailor material and projects to an individual student and adjust at the rate they improve.
"When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is known as Goodhart's Law
The parent is arguing for a target, not for a metric, so Goodhart's Law doesn't apply here.
I didn't know Olympiads do not have any score (metric). Thank you.
This is a BS saying because it's so easy to find counterexamples.
Let's try to use the number of child deaths, for example. By your saying, trying to do that is bad. Because governments probably will somehow resurrect dead children to look good at this metric. Right?
Look at what France, Japan, and USA consider childhood deaths. Back when I did medical software and wrote reports, France and Japan both lumped at lot of deaths post birth into 'death at birth' to lower their childhood death statistics.
No, but it is easy to see how reporting the death of children could be withheld - say for instance, if this metric had penalties associated with it.
Then it becomes a different metric.
I would like to point out for context that the author, Jordan Lasker, is a eugenist derided for shoddy science, falsely using university affiliations, and racist commentary.
I do not write this to contradict particular claims in the article above, but @cremieux should be read cautiously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker
He should also be derided for terrible writing. It's not until the 24th paragraph (of 30 total) that we encounter something resembling a thesis.
> With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads.
This could have been much shorter, but then the reader might notice the abject lack of supporting evidence for these central claims. I don't blame the author for burying them at the end.
I have no idea about author's background or about his other writings, but the conclusion quoted by you seems absolutely correct.
I do not understand why you say that it lacks supporting evidence.
Before this conclusion, the author has explained the system of national exams and of distribution into high schools and inside high schools, that ensures that the best students are grouped together and also that the best teachers are assigned to them.
There is no doubt that even if the average level of education is bad, this system guarantees that the best become very good and much better than students with similar native qualities who have stayed in high school in the middle of less capable colleagues, while being not taught things deemed too difficult for the general population. Moreover, the author has mentioned that the state provides rewards for good results at the International Olympiads, both for teachers and for students.
I do not see what more evidence could be brought. In my opinion the conclusion of the author is well supported and it explains why these students compete successfully against students from much bigger countries.
NB: None of what you are saying is confirmed by the WP page you are citing.
None?
> Much of Lasker's work and commentary focuses on race and IQ, and he has promoted eugenics.
So talking about eugenics in a positive way equals racist commentary?
I have a genetic mutation (de novo) that leads to a disability and that I don't want to pass on. Natural approach: Die, due to the lack of therapeutic modalities. No chance of offspring. With the help of medicine, I am alive. Now, to prevent passing on mutated genes but still have children, I could use something like IVF and reproductive genetics. This is textbook eugenics(?)
Obviously I disapprove of the stereotypical eugenics of the century. Ranging from Germans murdering disabled children to Danes forcing Greenland women on birth control.
Yes, culling the population by any means to select for the “intelligent” population is highly subjective and will result in racist outcomes.
Given that humanity has had a bad track record discussing eugenics positively, yes.
This definitely adds a grain of salt, but as far as I can tell, none of that shows in the article, especially in the final paragraphs explaining how the elitist system is overall bad for the country. But it does make me wonder about possible hidden flaws in the methodology (I'm still confused at some of the earlier statistics contradicting the claims made later)
> Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews and using them as an explanation is problematic for two reasons. The first is that there are too few to realistically explain Romanian Olympiad performance. The second is that we know the identities of Olympiad participants from Romania, and they don’t seem to be Jewish.
This struck me as…odd…before I even saw the parent comment.
This one is not odd and was worth mentioning before rejecting. Just look at American IMO team of 2024, in which most team members have Asian ancestry - some ethnic groups may indeed perform better than others. Picking Jews for this matter wasn’t unreasonable if you know the history of Eastern Europe.
This is not because people with Asian ancestry are smarter.
Who said they are smarter?
The general vibe of this magazine: support mainstreaming of eugenics ideas (and now eigenicists), the ubermensch / great man theory of history, and other ideas that we’ve largely shied away from for the last 75 years.
And cloak it in layers of language so that a quick read doesn’t catch it. It’s like human prompt poisoning.
Shouldn't everyone be read cautiously?
Sure, but knowing the intention and bias of the author is sometimes more important than other times. For example, it doesn’t really matter what the bias is of the person giving you the weather report; the weather either is or isn’t accurate, based on the data.
The author of an article about how an education system is or should be structured, however, very much matters.
TL;DR
"With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads."
A better question is: "Why should country X perform well in international Olympiads"?
It is just entertainment. It doesn't have any meaningful, deep or relevant impact on culture and quality of life of a country. At best it boost narcissistic jingoism and nationalism.
Life in a country won't get any better because someone that carries their flag appeared on television winning a medal. This is just a globalized version of the Roman "panis et circensis", but without the panis.
This magazine regularly publishes neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).
They’ve recently toned things down a bit, but it’s hard not to notice this vibe once you see it.
[1] https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/04/25/entrepreneurial-stat...
> neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).
I like how you imply that celebrating the space program, the Age of Discovery and math Olympiads is neo-fascist. Tells a lot about what neo-fascism apparently is.
Yes, it does.
I noticed this phenomenon several years ago and came to the following conclusions: Romania is strongly multi-ethnic. Germans from Saxony and Swabia immigrated to Transylvania 800 years ago. A thousand years ago, people from northern India immigrated, whom we now know as Gypsies and who make up 8-10% of the population. In the south, the country was besieged by the Ottomans/Turks for 400 years. The cognitive differences between these ethnic groups are enormous.
Some time ago, I asked ChatGPT to find the winners of the Math Olympiads, their schools, and their places of birth. Most of the Olympiad winners attended elite schools in Bucharest, with few math participants coming from the south of the country and no participants who could be classified as Gypsies. But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.
In 2023, for example, a computer science Olympiad participant from Orăștie (Hunedoara County) won a silver medal. Orăștie is located in Transylvania and historically had a Saxon community. Brașov (Kronstadt) also recently produced medal winners: in 2025, a student from the Meșotă College in Brașov won silver at the Chemistry Olympiad. Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg) also appears on the list – a student from the Bălcescu Lyceum there won silver at the Linguistics Olympiad in 2024. Timișoara (Temeswar)—also a western city with German history—was represented by a student (Carmen Sylva College) with an Honorable Mention in linguistics. These examples support the thesis that educational centers in the former Habsburg regions produce above-average talent.
Is there any further information about the ethnic origin of the Science Olympiad participants? I would be grateful for any information (even if it does not confirm the thesis).
Absolutely. That whole region (let's say Balkans+) has several different groups of people who are very different culturally and ethnically. And for some reason the press would blame whole countries for the crimes of specific minority groups. "Bulgarian gangs stealing cars", "Romanian gangs exploiting the UK benefits system", and so on.
I lost count of how many times I had to clarify to friends and family: "No, that's not representative of that country at all. I have friends and coworkers from there who are very well educated, hard workers, and good people. And you couldn't tell them apart from the rest of Europeans. Many of them won math/programming competitions and are smarter than me."
While most companies have a negative image of those countries due to media portrayals, investment banks in London figured it out so they fly whole recruiting teams there to hire graduates, _every year_. Some Big Tech companies figured this out, too. I've seen it first hand.
> No, that's not representative of that country at all
That goes for almost every country, no matter how culturally or ethnically homogeneous they are. This is how stereotypes work.
When people say groups are different, such as one ethnic group from another, they are looking at averages. It has very little relevance to looking at the top performers in a field. Each country only brings six people to IMO.
I disagree that there are cognitive differences between large ethnicities of people. Almost always, what we attribute as cognitive differences is differences in opportunity and societal power structures