2024 IMO was a scam
It’s a good thing we focus on pure maths and don’t worship the false idols of the Olympiads. We do them for fun and only really focus on them toward the very end because we prioritise long term educational goals over short term results. However, close to graduation, short term results do take up a lot of our attention.
It’s a good thing because the scam didn’t affect us as bad as maybe some people, though our student did manage to get sick on the day of the exam despite our efforts having kept him healthy all the way to the airport. Not to mention all the unnecessary preparation right before the exam.
I’ll mainly focus on Q5 but I’ll also talk about surrounding issues, if I ever get around to it I’ll talk about other stuff. Try Q5 yourself if you don’t want any spoilers.
Basically the 5th Problem of the contest was a troll. It had the property of being an impossible problem for very strong students (not all but many) and a trivial problem for many very weak students and many students in general. This resulted in the rankings of mathematical ability to be very meaningless and many so called achievements (or lack thereof) to be meritless.
For example, there were people whose HMs came from just Q5 and there were also several people who could solve Q3 and or Q6 but not Q5. There were at least two perfect scorers from 2023 who could not solve Q5, while there were also many students who could solve Q5 but not Q4. It was not just one special student having a good day or another having a bad day, it was a consistent and predictable experience with the problem across many students.
It must have been very strange to have swept day 1 and possibly even having gotten a perfect score the previous year to be stuck on Q5 at the 2.5 hour mark and not knowing whether they should skip to Q6. There was actually one clutch Korean student who skipped Q5 and solved Q6, the same could not be said for four of his teammates who seemed to have skipped too late to complete Q6. Nor for the three Chinese students whose difficulties with Q5 cost them both Q5 and Q6, which also happened to one student from the USA, while another 5 students from this elite group seemed to have stuck it through with Q5 successfully but had nothing left for Q6.
The thing is, we shouldn’t blame the problem, we should blame people. This fiasco was totally avoidable. Playtest the exam you idiots! (This would probably be like the perfect role for those US and Chinese students that miss out while being far stronger than most of the other contestants.) I could see with my Junior class that there were problems with this question. Especially in combination with Q4, it does not make sense. There were year 7 beginners that got the main idea to the problem in less than one hour along with several other students under exam conditions. So even not seeing the other extreme, it was clear that it was not suitable as Q5 for the IMO. Also many leaders voted for it, they have to take some responsibility, it is partly their fault this IMO was such a disaster. It is even more remarkable that leaders actually exposed the trap in their attempt at the problem and still voted for it! Don’t make some lame excuse like the other problems were bad too, because if they were all bad you’ve got to get more problems.
Then after this fiasco, people go to vote for the cut-offs. Wtf were they thinking? So instead of trying to fix this mistake, they vote for cut-offs that make it possible to skip Bronze entirely with one problem! So you can get 15 and not get Bronze, solve one problem (Q5 say) and get 22 and get a Silver. Also, who did better? Someone who go 0 for Q5 or someone who got 2 points? You could argue its worse to see the main idea and not know how to solve the problem, while 710700 is HM but 700720 is a Bronze. (710770 is a Silver!)
Why does this guy care? Its just a kids exam right? Well these kids for the most part only get to do something like this once in their lives, prepare for a good part of a year and travel half way across the world, putting their trust in the organisers to set a fair exam. What did they get? For most, they got to try Q2 and have their whole contest decided by it (not to mention that Q2 was basically a repeat of a problem that appeared on the selection exams of some country). While for many, who achieved more in their preparations, they got told they were way worse than those who achieved less in their preparations.
Maybe the medals should have been Green, Yellow and Blue. There is no merit or meaning in something like this.