As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.

The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.

I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.

There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).

Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.

However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.

A fun fact surprisingly not mentioned in the article, and which I thought would be topical at this time, is that the Romanians apparently love their math olympiads so much that they recently elected as their president an International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) medalist. The current president Nicușor Dan had perfect scores at the IMO both times he participated (one of only 12 students so far with a perfect score in each of their ≥2 participations [1]). In fact at IMO 1988 he was one of only 11 students who solved the famous/notorious “Vieta jumping” problem [2], which eluded even Terence Tao (who, to be fair, was participating at only 13 years old!).

The Wikipedia section of “Notable [IMO] participants” has three sections: “Mathematicians”, “Computer scientists”, and “Other”, with Dan being the sole entry in the last one. :) [3]

[1]: http://imo-official.org/hall.aspx?column=perfectscores&order...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vieta_jumping&old...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Internati...

There are many factors - most of them economic and cultural - but it all starts with an intense maths syllabus in school, Soviet Union style. Here's the current one for 5th to 8th grade: https://www.scribd.com/document/184259748/The-Romanian-Maths...

Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., it seems that many neighbouring countries who had similar schooling systems perform similarly or better "per capita" (Hungary with <10M people, placed 5th; Romania 19M at 6th; Bulgaria with <7M at 8th; Serbia at 30th with <8M, Croatia at 42nd with <5M people — two of which should probably get some share of Yugoslavia's medals at 39th — there's also Serbia and Montenegro separately).

So, Romania is at the sweet spot of high selectivity and population size to really pop out in these types of competitions, but it seem it's not really that unique as it's being suggested.

I believe the original intent of such Olympiads was to test how pupils equipped with only standard school education would tackle non-standard puzzles. Eventually this turned into pupils attending special schools, having coaches, doing such non-standrdad puzzles all day long during their studies in order to win medals. A leetcode grind all the way down.

Author aside I thought this was a very interesting answer to a question I didn't know I had.

I had been thinking that sending my children to a school with high achievers could leave her at a relative disadvantage but this data would seem to say otherwise.

I wonder if this conflicts with Malcolm Gladwell's observations on one's relative ranking when it comes to college matriculation (that its more important to be at a high percentile of your institution than your global rank)

The education system is stratified, keeping high-achieving students together, promoting them to schools with good teachers, etc.

OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?

It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.

Bulgaria has been performing pretty well despite of the declining quality of education, which was stellar during Communism. Nobody was pushing us to advance in Math and Science; there was just nothing better to do. I wish these times could come back. Right now, kids are faced with all kinds of distractions and little incentive to go into studying seriously.

Hungarian jews are also extremely smart anecdotally.

The author is Jordan Lasker (also known by internet handle Crémieux). Much of Lasker's work and commentary focuses on race and IQ, and he has promoted eugenics. On X and Substack, Lasker is known for compiling charts on what he calls the "Black-White IQ gap"

> Since 2020, Romania’s performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) has been nothing short of amazing. In 2022, Romania came in fifth overall, fourth in 2023, and twelfth in 2024.

Here's how those three years compare to surrounding years:

  2017 22
  2018 33
  2019 17
  2020 15
  2021 27
  2022  5
  2023  4
  2024 12
  2025 13

I'm not sure much can be read into this. The participants are usually high school students, and the top contestants from a given country usually participate in multiple years, and each country's team had 6 contestants.

It only takes getting a two or three outstanding students for a country to shoot significantly up for a couple years or so, depending on how close in age those students are.

For the 3 years the article mentions, 2022-2024, Romania had 2 people who were there all 3 years, 5 people who were there for 2 of the 3 years, and only 2 people who were only there for 1 year.

The 2023 team had 5 people from 2022. For 2024 half the 2023 team was replaced.

Looking at several years of their teams and individual performances it looks like they regularly have people who do well. A lot of people place in ranked 150+ one year, then shoot way up in the next year or next two, and then drop way down again.

For example they had a guy who 2018-2020 ranked 174, 15, 4. But they didn't in those last two years have anyone else also peaking.

In 2021-2024 they had a guy who went 143, 32, 1, 82.

In 2021-2023 they had a guy who went 319, 23, 46.

In 2017-2025 all the years except 2022-2024 had 2 people in the top 100. 2022 and 2023 had all 6 in the top 100, and 2024 had 3 in the top 100.

Looking at all this 2022-2024 plausibly could be explained as just a matter of timing. They seem to always have some people who are good enough to get a high score at least once. Some do it their first year and then don't participate any more. Some participate multiple times but only hit that high once. A smaller number hit multiple highs.

With just a small change in the timing of when some of these people appear or when they hit their peaks, so that they happen at the same time instead of missing each other by a small number of years, many of those other teams could before 2022 could have been top 10 teams.

Update: here is Romania's rank going backwards from 2025 to 1979:

  2025: 13, 12, 4, 5, 27, 15,
  2019: 17, 33, 22, 20, 13, 11, 22, 10, 8, 16,
  2009: 13, 17, 11, 6, 6, 10, 7, 8, 15, 11,
  1999: 4, 11, 7, 1, 2, 9, 11, 3, 3, 4,
  1989: 2, 2, 1, 6, 1, 3, 5, 11, 20, no IMO this year,
  1979: 2

For the next 10 years they fell off a little. It was during this time (2003 specifically) that they started using a national test to assign people to high schools.

The decade after that fell off a little more. It was at the start of that decade (2010) that they switched to the Evaluarea Națională mentioned in the article.

This is a very interesting topic and the article seems quite thorough. But I have trouble interpreting the crucial "School and track sorting can bolster or bust academic achievement" plots: The y axis is labelled "Graduation score percentile", but it has negative numbers on the scale. How are these values being corrected?

The series for 1-school towns on the left plot is basically flat; am I supposed to believe that, in such towns, students entering the school with a 0.5 on the high school admission test appear at the same exit exam percentile (implying that they have the same average exit exam scores) as those who entered with a 9.5? That can't possibly be true.

ETA: I also thought the conclusion -- that other countries should adopt a similar education model -- was out of step with most of the body text, which seemed to stress the downsides for weaker students. (There's no actual contradiction here, and perhaps the claim about most of society's advances being due to the top-end achievers was intended to justify this angle, but I was nevertheless surprised that there wasn't much discussion of why this upside should overpower the concerns for weaker students.)

I think Poland is in very similar spot, often punching above its weight in software and math. My own amateur explanation is that Polish language is pretty complex and very particular about correct words and word forms. So Polish kids get a good training in keeping track of details of notations just by learning their native language.

Tl;dr - Romania, like other Eastern European states, uses "tracking" or separate educational streams, so students from "National Colleges" (the top tier of Romanian high schools) tend to be overrepresented.

> The design of Romania’s educational system makes it perhaps the most stratified educational system in the world

> One of the cruel parts of the Romanian system is that, though sorting is nationally available, students do not have equal opportunities to sort. Students located in smaller towns have fewer high school options to select from unless they’re among the few who opt into a military academy, which means joining the military

> This combined sorting between schools and tracks means that low-ability students get stuck with other low-ability students, and high-ability students are surrounded by other high-ability students. In effect, peer groups throughout high school are extremely homogeneous.

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While this is good for identifying talent for Olympiads, it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole. Neighboring Poland doesn't have the same level of tracking in it's educational system and has much stronger human capital based on HDI compared to Romania, despite both being roughly comparable to each other in the 1990s.

Human capital isn't developed by having a minority of students becoming the cream of the crop, it comes by helping all students get the option or ability to rise to the academic level at which they can succeed irrespective of geographic location (small town vs city), ethnicity, or economic class.

Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.

And anecdotally at least, I went to HS and college with a decent number of national and international Olympiad winners (one of whom was both a IMO and IPhO team member concurrently), and while they did decent in life (some HFT, mostly academia) it wasn't much different of an outcome compared to our peers who didn't partake in those olympiads.

This shouldn't dissuade people from doing Olympiads if they wish, but targeting Olympiad success for the sake of Olympiad success seems toxic and a waste of resources.

Edit: cannot reply

> Cyberax

I am not opposed to students participating in Olympiads od they chose so with full autonomy and independence, just like I am not opposed to students who want to do well in sports because they like sports.

If you are forcing your kid to be a tier 1 quarterback OR a IMO participant, you aren't making them a well rounded student.

And if you as a society make "being a football player" or "being a topper" the primary goal, you aren't actually identifying new talent, because the only way to rise to the top in a field is if you have an actual aptitude AND interest.

There's a reason why China and India are seeing significant social opposition from younger generations about "test driven" and "rote" culture, the same way plenty of boomer nerds on HN who grew up in the 80s and 90s were probably ostracized for not being into football (idk - I wasn't around for much of the 90s, I'm subsisting of pop culture from that era like Daria)

Well, you set up a system that fosters competition, you get excellence as a result.

DUH.

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus also have similar systems, and they punch way above their weight in math and CS: https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=RUS https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=UKR https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=BLR

Ironically, the US schools do have tracking. For athletics.

The US absolutely _needs_ to have a school system that challenges students. No more nonsense about racist algebra.

I would like to point out for context that the author, Jordan Lasker, is a eugenist derided for shoddy science, falsely using university affiliations, and racist commentary.

I do not write this to contradict particular claims in the article above, but @cremieux should be read cautiously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker

TL;DR

"With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads."

This magazine regularly publishes neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).

They’ve recently toned things down a bit, but it’s hard not to notice this vibe once you see it.

[1] https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/04/25/entrepreneurial-stat...

A better question is: "Why should country X perform well in international Olympiads"?

It is just entertainment. It doesn't have any meaningful, deep or relevant impact on culture and quality of life of a country. At best it boost narcissistic jingoism and nationalism.

Life in a country won't get any better because someone that carries their flag appeared on television winning a medal. This is just a globalized version of the Roman "panis et circensis", but without the panis.

Romania is wasting taxpayer money to groom bright students and then let them leave Romania for some higher GDP country