When I mention my time on the math team in high school, no one I know has ever heard of it, even though I had a box full of trophies from competitions I went to on weekends.
Our high school had two teams: number sense and calculator. I was primarily on the number sense team. It’s a 70-question test; you have 10 minutes to complete as many math problems as possible, and you’re penalized for skipping problems. You can’t write anything down but the answers; you don’t get scrap paper; and you can’t erase. The problems usually started with addition and subtraction and worked their way into calculus or something similar. I could usually get 30-40 questions done.
(You learn a lot of shortcuts, especially for multiplication, and we memorized our squares through 30. I used to be able to add in bases other than 10, but that skill has long since deserted me. It just didn’t have much application for a business degree. But I can still multiply by 11, 25, 75 in my head and one of my favorite shortcut is the double-and-half multiplication method. :))
Calculator competition used scientific calculators to solve extremely long and difficult problems (it’s much harder than you’d think). I believe the time limit was longer and you could use scrap paper, but the number of questions was the same.
When I was in High School, we had Math Teams that went and competed at other schools. We were part of the Central Jersey Math League (CJML). We got patches and everything.
Matches were after school, held at a rotating set of sites, and involved all the schools in the League. You got one hour to answer ten questions. Results were written in numerical or algebraic form on the given line. No partial credit – problems were either Right or Wrong.
Typical problem: We’ve conveerted to a decimal clock system, with ten hours in a day of 100 minutes each. Give 6:15 PM in decimal time.
Another: A sculpture consists of two cubes, one atop the other. The height is 4 feet and the Volume is 28 cubic feet. What’s the Surface Area? (Watch it – there’s a twist)
We had a math fair once a year. The big event was the relay race. You had 4 people. Person 1 would get some sort of story problem and come up with answer A. Person 2 had a story problem, with the answer from person A as a variable or a dimension or whatever, and his result was answer B. Person 3 had answer B as a dimension or variable in his problem to arrive at answer C. Person 4 would use answer C as one of the varialbles or dimensions to compute answer D. So we’d start the race, each team’s first person would solve and pass the slip with answer A to person 2, and so on. The winner would be the first team to submit 4 correct answers. If no correct solutions, then the team with most correct solutions in the shortest time won.
Well, it was in a different specific format, but I was on my High School’s NJ Math League team, though I was the low man on the totem pole - the only non-GENIUS, mathwise, on the team.
Our tests were shorter, 10 or 12 questions, with longer time limits, maybe a half-hour, and I don’t think there was a skipped question penalty. The questions were tough, but the best players on our team typically got 8-12 correct, while I got from 2-5…
Ours were more like 166 + 644 - 123 for the first few questions, 14 x 34 for questions 5-20 and converting bases 5 (base 2) + 6 (base 8) = what in base 10 and stuff for questions in the 20-30 range. Some tests were easier and I could get between 40 and 50 questions done. Others were harder and I’d have to stop at about 30.
I know of one guy in a higher division school who finished all the questions on his test one time with a minute to spare, and told the testers that question 69 was unworkable. And he was right. Keep in mind that those last 20 or so questions were usually fairly advanced calculus and trig questions that had to be done in your head.
On Oahu, there was a math meet on one Saturday every month. Each team had 10 members (no more than 5 seniors), each member competed in 3 out of a possible 6 events (Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Number Theory). Each event consisted of 3 questions worth 2, 3 & 5 points, with a 10 minute time limit. Then there was a team event at the end of the meet where 3 members worked together on one problem worth 10 points.
I was a captain my senior year and I remember strategizing with the coach and co-captain, trying to match up each team member with their strong events.
I also remember I scored a perfect 30 just once, but that was one more time than my brother - so I never let him forget it!
Ah, yes. But I did it in junior high. I was the only girl in my grade representing my school at state. I competed in Number Sense and calculator competition, sometimes did the science quiz as well. Oh, and we were Mathletes, too! And we had hideous t-shirts advertising all of these things!
Don’t know why I can barely do more than arithmetic now, though I still impress people with FOIL.
I remember in jr. high that the math competitions were individuals against each other and all jr. highs in the area had about 4 or 5 students representing. When I was in 8th grade, I somehow got enrolled into basic math class instead of algebra. I should have been in algebra as well, but I wasn’t a complainer and just did the mountains of paperwork for that class while the teacher sat and read the newspaper. He would give us about 4 to 6 worksheets that should take up the whole period, but I started finishing them sooner and sooner (correctly) and then I would kick back and make a nuisance of myself.
When the math competition came later that year, I was somehow included with 4 other algebra students representing our school and there were 10-12 other schools with their reps as well competing. The test given to us was about 200 questions long and we were given 60 minutes to complete as many as possible. If you got a question wrong, -1…if you don’t answer it, 0…right = +1. My strategy was obvious…skip any tough algebra problems and turn on my afterburners on everything else. When the test was done, I talked a little to my fellow students and asked how they did. “I only got to #81!”, “I got stuck on the polynomial problem!”, etc., etc. My response was “I read every problem on the test at least once, answered about 160 of them and then reread the other 40 and picked out the easier algebra problems and answered them as well.” Score = 172.
Speed killed on that day. Got a nifty 13" B/W TV from K-Mart with the $100 I won. I peaked waaayyyyy too soon, and I’m a math sloth now.
Our math team actually started toward the end of my last year of junior high. I was in it through part of 11th grade, when boys and my job started taking priority and I quit.
I did the science quizzes also, and won a few trophies, but they were literally won by luck. Then they changed the rules and said any test that had an obvious discernible pattern would be disqualified (these were multiple choice tests and I remember doing stuff like all A’s on the first column, all B’s on the 2nd, and so on. And winning a trophy for it.
My boyfriend’s maths team in high school was the most kick-arse team in the state. Their captain was on the Australian Maths Olympic team, or something like that, and the rest of them were no slouches either. They arrived half an hour late to one maths competition and only had half an hour to finish, but still won. All the other teams hated them.
When we were in our final years at high school I saw their team compete at a university competition, including pure maths students and even a team of maths professors. They came fourth and were disappointed. While they were competing, the audience were given complicated maths questions on an overhead projector, and if you were the first person to answer you got some sort of small edible reward. In between working his problems, my boyfriend would text message the answers to the overhead problem as well.
