Leading up to the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) 10 and 12 tests in early November every year, many students on campus engage in rigorous and varied preparation to sharpen their skills. This year, 85 students registered to take an AMC test.
By doing well on the AMC tests, students potentially qualify for prestigious math competitions like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), the USA Junior Math Olympiad (USAJMO) and the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO). As such, students use a variety of preparation methods to succeed on the AMC tests.
For instance, many students from the school have taken courses at Random Math, a local math program founded by class of ‘23 alumnus Nilay Mishra’s parents. Junior Lawson Wang, who has qualified for USAJMO three times, attended Random Math for six years.
According to Wang, Random Math excels at helping students develop good problem recognition and problem solving techniques through their approach of providing a large quantity of diverse problems and encouraging students to adapt to different types of problems.
“I teach math at TJMC sometimes, and when I do, I feel like one of the bigger problems is that students are often unable to recognize when to apply certain concepts, or how to spot when to use certain ideas or concepts,” Wang said.
Although the class provides a lot of preparation and improves problem solving ability, Wang said he has found that the time commitment for rigorous contest preparation is too high as high school has gone on. During the summer, he stopped taking classes at the program.
Since Wang left Random Math, he has been taking online classes every weekend in a course by Awesome Math. Wang views Awesome Math as more of a reference he can use when studying, rather than something that he commits a lot of time to. Wang also learned math through an online course called Worldwide Online Olympiad Training (WOOT), hosted by the organization Art of Problem Solving (AoPS).
However, for some students, like senior Alan Lu, who has taken WOOT, such online courses don’t provide the same energy and motivation that in-person courses like Random Math do.
“I think the biggest benefit from Random Math was the people, since the atmosphere of all these motivated students helped motivate me as well, and you could see other people’s perspectives in problems you couldn’t solve,” Lu said. “It was difficult to feel the same energy from WOOT, which was online.”
Another strategy that many students use is self-studying. Many former Random Math students like sophomore Andy Lu have turned to self-studying for better flexibility and efficiency. He also feels that group lessons don’t provide much help, since skill levels can be different.
Alan Lu also left Random Math for a similar reason, saying that at a certain skill level, the classes became more redundant. It was after he left Random Math that he started learning through Olympiad Training for Individual Study (OTIS).
“It eventually got to where the classes weren’t helping that much, since I had a pretty strong foundation in most of Olympiad math,” he said. “Learning by myself and doing lots of olympiad problems through OTIS helped more.”
Many students who self-study also use the AoPS website to find practice problems and past tests on the forums, as well as reading AoPS preparation books.
Although self studying provides more flexibility, sophomore Warren Yang, who has both self studied and taken classes at Random Math, believes that self-studying also has some flaws, and overall, taking courses would benefit students more.
“Classes provide you a guideline for what to learn, and self-studying can get hard because when you’re stuck, you don’t have any teachers that can help you,” Yang said.
Wang noted that while in-person classes like Random Math provide motivation and a lot of practice in problem solving, other options like self-studying or taking online classes give more flexibility in both time and studying.
“Even though self-studying with online classes has been much more flexible, I still don’t regret taking Random Math since it definitely helped me improve my skills,” Wang said.
