I pit the Putnam Exam for shattering my confidence in my mathematical abilities. Well, not really, but it was painful. Through the Graces of God I may have got one or one and a half correct. Last year when I took it I ended up with 1 point out of 120. But, gah!, there are people who score in the 60’s or higher every year. Who are these people? Witches? Warlocks?
Any other dopers take the test today, or years ago?
I took the test years ago. I believe I got a few right, but I can’t remember my score any more.
I imagine that it helps to practice.
Anyway, I did a lot of math contests in high school. I’ve only met 2 people who were clearly better than me at math. (I’m sure there are a lot more, but I’ve only met 2 of them). One guy has been a starving grad student for the last 15 years. The other makes $20 million a year on Wall Street.
Oh man, the memories! The painful, ego-crushing memories! It was years ago, now, and I was all puffed up because my diff-eq professor had suggested that I take it even though I wasn’t a math major.
But it was so hard! The worst part was that the questions were so damn interesting. And while I was dead certain that their solutions were elegant and satisfying, they were totally fucking opaque to my poor, plodding, mortal mind. I don’t know how I did on that exam, and I don’t think I ever want to know.
I did enjoy mulling over the published Putnam problem sets in the following years, as a diversion without any performance pressure. Not that I solved many of those, either, but they really are things of beauty.
I took the Putnam twice without scoring a single point. And I practiced for it, too. The third time, I got 9 or 10 points. There was a guy in my class who regularly got 50+ points on it. Just phenomenally good at math. I think he interned at the NSA…
I read in the Wikipedia article that “That year [2006], the examination was taken by 3,640 students, with 63% scoring 0.” I would be in the 63%, whether I exerted myself or no.
I remember taking the test back in 1985, scored either a 12 or 21…I can’t remember. I thought that was a horrible score back then, so I didn’t think nothing of it…until now.
I never took the Putnam because I was a major slacker back then. I wish I had.
(whine whine whine)
You know what I see here? Two main points…
[ul]
[li]I did badly, but I would have done much better had I practised. Therefore, don’t let my bad results mislead you - I am better than you.[/li][li]The only 2 people who I admit were better than me at maths are wildly successful - so even though I have a tangible lack of results, I could still kick your arse if I really tried…[/li][/ul]
So you took the test and did badly, but still have a superiority complex? Is that the take-home message?
30 y.o. student
I took it twice.
I got a zero the first time.
The second time I took it, I and several other students had done a volunteer study session once a week for a semester with a professor. We did problems with each other, on the board, had discussions; we prepped as much as we could. We focussed only on areas that we might excel, knowing that our best chance of scoring was nailing one where we “specialized”.
Test came. I found a question that was right up my alley. I put together what I thought was a reasonable proof, and after our discussions after the test, others thought that I had maybe nailed it (and by nailing it, I mean, getting a 10).
I got a 1. I think everyone else got 0’s.
FWIW, several of these people went on to get masters and Ph.D’s in math & science.
I know one guy who did well. He went on to do a Ph.D at Washington University in Saint Louis.
It’s a ridiculously difficult exam. You can’t let it destroy your confidence. It’s possible that it is used to identify the truly gifted. I don’t think it’s a general exam for evaluating all undergraduate math students.
Are you familiar with the Putnam? There are 12 questions total, each worth 10 points. Getting “a few” right means getting 20-40 points, I would presume. That’s not doing badly, it’s doing quite well.
Someone else quoted that 63% of the takers got 0 points recently. And this is a strongly self-selected group. The only people who take the Putnam are people who are interested enough in math to give up 6 hours on a Saturday to take a math test.
I find this hard to believe.
There’s no way you took the test with the ability to score 12 or 21, and just realized NOW that that was good.
I assume you were a mathematics major, right?
The Putnam was almost monolithic. If you scored a 20, you would have been celebrated in your math department, and probably woo’ed by good graduate schools.
Everyone knew that a non-zero score put you in the 50th percentile, and that a 20 probably put you in the 75th percentile.
And like someone else said, this wasn’t jsut a self-selecting group. This was a self-selecting group of math students. Only the ones who really wanted to challenge themselves, and thought they had a chance to do well took it.
WTF?? I never heard of a test where the majority of the test-takers get zero.
Is there a special topic of emphasis every time the offer the test, and if it isn’t your specialty, or the one you studied for, you’re hosed?
No. 12 questions.
It’s a safe bet that you haven’t had anything more than cursory exposure to half the questions.
Of the half where you can even figure out what they’re talking about, they’re difficult, probably graduate level. Even if you’ve taken 2 semesters of abstract algebra, say, because you really like it, the abstract algebra question would still be difficult.
As I recall, there was discrete math, algebra, geometry, diff eq, real analysis, all the undergraduate stalwarts, basically.
So, if you score 10 out of 120, you’re in the 72% percentile.
Between 85 and 98, Harvard or Duke won every year.
Also, the test is a test of your proof, not your answer.
Get the right answer with a hole in your proof, and you get 1 point (out of 10). Although technically each question could get any score in [0,10], practically a question gets a score of 0,1,(rarely)9, or 10.
The test is given in 2 3-hour sections, with 6 questions each. The strategy for any person of less than truly incredible ability is to pick a single question in each section and solve it really well. Picking the right question is critical. Year 2 I spent all of the first section trying to solve a problem about the maximum length of a section of parabola inscribed in a unit circle, integrating along the curve, and not only did I not get the right answer, to this day I don’t quite understand where I went wrong. That was just beyond my calculus abilities at the time (and I haven’t taken further calc classes since, so I’d guess it remains beyond them).
My suggestion to anyone who is taking it: learn the pigeonhole principle and how to apply it. Now that I’ve thought a bit more, I think my score the third year was a 12 (ie, three right answers, one good proof), and 11 of those points were due to the pigeonhole principle.
Believe it. I did get a pat on my back from one of my professors for getting a positive score, but I wasn’t the highest scoring of our group, so I thought he was just patting me on the back in a consoling ‘nice try’ kind of way. Beyond that, I thought nothing of it.
True…I had started out majoring in architecture/urban planning but changed to applied math, my strong suit, but my interests changed over to comp. sci. and geography. Towards the end, I was kicking around astronomy, but my college was very light on curriculum for that major. I was all over the place on what to do in my life. After 7 years of college and 2 years of dicking around, I ended up with a B.S. in App. Math, B.S. in Comp. Sci., and a minor in Geography. I wanted to work at JPL or a contractor for JPL, or ESRI and I interviewed for jobs there. So what choice did I make? Forgot it all and took some Accounting and Business Management courses to start a business with my wife opening a day program for developmentally disabled adults, which we successfully operate to this very day.
Shit, now I think I only got a 12 because of the lack-luster fanfare I got. No matter how well I did, I would not have considered grad school since I was already working full time and living on my own since I was 18 in 1982. If someone had said that I should consider grad school (and honestly, I can’t recall if anyone did), I would have politely said no. But my math skills have been well eroded over the last 18 years since I have not used it for anything beyond my financial needs and other rudimentary uses.
“A starving grad student for the past 15 years” is wildly successful? :dubious:
Sure - at least in mathematical terms. I presume that 15 years is an exaggeration: if not, then there’s something amiss.
But if he has been a starving grad student for, say, 7 years, that means his maths abilities were good enough to get onto a maths PhD programme - that’s gotta be better than first percentile? Wildly successful was hyperbole, but in the maths world he’s not doing too badly for himself!
30 y.o. student
Lol. Look at his username.
It’s amazing how much of math-puzzle solving ability comes from practice… back in my high school days, I was on the first two California teams to enter the American Regions Math League (ARML) competition, which pits 15-person teams from different regions against each other. California is the most populous state, and our team organizer used the AHSME and AIME competitions to hopefully track down the 15 best math-test-problem-solvers in the state.
We got clobbered. We not only lost to the team from New York City (a City! vs. a State! The biggest state!), we also lost to the New York City B Team. Why? Because NYC people are smarter than Californians? Well, possibly 
But more likely, because the ARML has been going on for years there, they have practices, team building, etc. We had 15 people who’d never met each other before and one practice session.
(I’m trying now to remember if I took the Putnam exam in college, and I honestly don’t think I did.)