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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

This is interesting if true, but without data I can't take this claim at face value.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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