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- How do I sign my child up for the AMC 8/10/12?
Many middle schools offer the AMC 8. Many middle and high schools offer the AMC 10/12. If your school doesn’t, check around local schools to see if they offer it and if they will allow you to take it at their school. You can also use this website for local universities that offered it in the past (or are offering it this year:
https://www.maa.org/math-competitions/amc-8/locations
If you happen to live near an AOPS Academy campus or another extracurricular in-person math program, such as AlphaStar, or MomentumLearning, you can also ask if you can take it with them.
You can also offer to pay for the registration costs for your school if your school complains they don’t have the resources for it. The registration cost for 2022-2023 is $56 per organization/school and $27 per bundle of 10 tests. This is orders of magnitudes cheaper than AP exams or SAT tests. It’s true that sometimes schools or colleges won’t have a single teacher willing to proctor or be able to find an available room at the specified test date to accommodate proctoring the test though.
You may also find the following search helpful:
AMC 10/12 ZIP code search
It lets you search for the schools (middle or high school) within an X mile radius from a ZIP code who offered the AMC 10/12 in the past or is offering it in the current year.
2. How do I sign my child up for Mathcounts?
Most students do Mathcounts via their school. If your school doesn’t do mathcounts, you can ask the principal or a math teacher at your school if they can start doing mathcounts. You can also register as an individual in some cases. If you are home-schooled, you should register through your home-school organization. See Mathcounts Website for more details:
https://www.mathcounts.org/programs/competition-rules-faq
3. What other Math competitions are available through the school year?
See above google doc.
4. Why is it might it be beneficial to do math competitions?
There are many valid opinions about this. My own view is that some math competitions contain interesting and fun or challenging problems to think about. If the competition is in-person, you can also meet people with similar interests as you and make friends. Socializing at math competitions is another big aspect of math competitions. I remember almost nothing from the math problems that appeared on the math competitions I did, but I made good friends from math competitions.
5. How do I find out if my region has an ARML team?
Check out my partial list of ARML websites here:
6. Why might taking a math class outside of school be a good idea even if my child has no interest in math competitions?
Some people just take outside classes to be in the same class as their friends. Some people want to learn problem solving outside of regular school math. Some people just want to meet and hang out with people who have similar interests as them. There could be many reasons.
One problem with school math is that it does not typically promote much creativity, problem solving, or critical thinking in math classes. It’s important to be a strong problem solving in order to do an interesting job as an adult in today’s society. Hence, even if you aren’t interested in timed math competitions, it may still be good to learn extracurricular math for the sake of math enrichment.
This is similar to how you might not technically need to learn a musical instrument or learn how to program to be a functional adult in society, but there is still cultural value in the activity. And it’s interesting.
In fact, many of the best Math Summer Camps, such as HCSSIM, Canada/USA Mathcamp, Mathily, Ross, PROMYS, SPARC, and MathPath, and others, do not focus on math competitions at all and instead focus on exposing students to cool math beyond the standard school or math competition curriculum experience.
Another valid reason to take a math class outside of school is to get ahead in school math levels.
Xinke's Math Academy 