Students of all ages from all over the world who are interested in math participate in math competitions every year. It is advantageous for students to apply for worldwide universities such as University of Toronto and University of Waterloo with certificates in some math competitions. In Canada, universities are usually interested in recruiting students with strong logical thinking abilities and imaginative capacity. Fortunately, attending math clubs and participating in math competitions can help students build these abilities.
CSMC (Canadian Senior Mathematics Contests) are open for students who are in Grade 11 or 12. It is organized by one of the best Mathematics schools in the world, the University of Waterloo. With 9 questions in total, the contest lasts for 2 hours and it is scored out of 60. With the certificates of this contest, university applicants might possibly get extra credit and make a good impression on their resume.
On the other hand, the Euclid Contest provides over 19,000 senior students the opportunity to tackle creative problems with the math skills they developed throughout high school. The 2.5-hours contest challenges the learner’s perseverance while some laborious problems require strong logical and imaginative skills. Crucially, students are evaluated by the process of their solution, including completeness, clarity, and style. It is significantly helpful for the universities’ applicants.
Most math competitions require students to have various styles of mathematical thinking, while it becomes easy for the competitors to think outside the box yet with strong logic. That means students could surprise themselves with new ideas and perhaps do better than they ever expected. Moreover, new mathematical and scientific phenomenon or formulas would be discovered just like how Newton found the Law of Universal Gravitation. Furthermore, the mathematical thinking skill is necessarily significant in real-life circumstances as well. For example, it is quite useful for cooking as there are requirements in recipes to put different amounts of ingredients together.
Students in high school actually love and enjoy their process of solving those mathematic problems. “It is certainly an improvement of my thinking skills and I feel more confident after I got those certificates in the contests,” said the top-finisher in CSMC from Shanghai Nanyang Model Private High School.
For better or worse, much of life is competition; meanwhile, the tremendous intellectual opportunity for students would only benefit them.
