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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Another strike against genuine education. Now prep schools that have 17 valedictorians will help their students pad their applications with nonsense extra-curricular activities and experiences. However it's likely much easier to create the same pastiche of fluff in poorly-performing schools than it is to actually raise test scores.

Now more than ever, college signals nothing other than the ability to follow rules and jump through hoops. Such a tragedy.

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Alternatively, this may prompt more students to take the AMC examinations.

https://www.maa.org/math-competitions

Good luck self studying for those -- I tried. I made AIME but had no chance there.

There's no way a significant number of generic public high schools start caring about the AMC. It will just be helicopter parents, wealthy private schools and the odd self motivated student.

You can study for the AMC–I used to (disclaimer: I knew a lot people who did so as well). However, doing well on the AMC usually means you need to actually understand what you're doing; it's fairly difficult to cheese your way through.

If anything, I think the AMC exams are more vulnerable to prep than the SAT/ACT in the following sense: I think a bright and disciplined kid who does lots of self-study (e.g. using the free Khan Academy SAT materials [1]) has a decent chance to do well on the SAT/ACT, even compared to a bright and disciplined kid whose parents pay for classes. I think the gap is bigger for AMC stuff because, IMO, it's harder to teach yourself math competition skills. In that sense, access to paid instruction becomes a much bigger edge.

Math competition skills also test something very specific and are a pretty useless metric for most people.

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/sat

> 17 valedictorians

You think that's bad? I know some kids at a public school in a rich neighborhood that had almost fifty valedictorians.

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