The International Olympiads are annual competitions for gifted pre-university students that test their knowledge, critical thinking, laboratory, and problem-solving skills on the global stage. They seek to promote excellence in education, collaboration, and talent recognition beyond the school curricula.
The Olympiads are held in various subjects, such as the natural sciences, mathematics, and social sciences. The governments of participating countries support these competitions.
Indian students have been acing the Olympiads for many decades. It’s rare for Indian students not to get a gold, silver or bronze medal in them. But what happens to these students? Do they go on to become scientists and mathematicians?
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The origins of Olympiads
The idea of olympiads originated with the Hungarian Mathematical and Physical Society’s Eötvös Competition, held since 1884, to provide talented young individuals with free university education. The competition questions judged participants’ ingenuity rather than their memorized knowledge. The Eötvös Competition award has previously gone to prominent scientists, including Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller.
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Boris Delaunay, a well-known mathematician, organized the first mathematics Olympiad in Leningrad in 1934. He arranged for young individuals who won the tournament to be admitted to Leningrad University’s Mathematics Department without having to take any formal entrance exams. Working-class youngsters struggled with traditional entrance exams and Soviet educationists maintained that the Olympiads would allow for “widening participation,” ensuring the constant progression of working-class children through the school system.
The first international Olympiad, the Mathematics Olympiad, was conducted in Braşov, Romania in 1959. Initially, only countries from the socialist bloc participated. The Soviet Union and other communist bloc countries employed a similar approach for the “identification of gifted youth” and proposed that universities use Olympiads to recruit students to mathematics, mechanical, and physics departments.
After Sputnik, many western countries joined the effort, and the international olympiads slowly became genuinely international. Inspired by the Mathematics Olympiad, the International Physics Olympiad was first conducted in Warsaw, Poland, in 1967.
Since then, olympiads have been introduced in 12 additional fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, and astrophysics. The most recent is the International Nuclear Science Olympiad (INSO) organiesd by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA).
Indians make a splash
India’s participation in the international olympiads commenced in 1989 with the Mathematics Olympiads. Eventually, Indian teams started preparing and competing at the international level, and, today, between 20,000 and 60,000 students enroll in different subject olympiads every year.
Different organisations act as the nodal centres for conducting screening tests, selection of the Indian teams and preparing the teams for international competitions. The Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (HBCSE TIFR), Mumbai, organizes five of the olympiads until the selection and training of the team. The rest of the olympiads are managed by other organisations, including the Indian Association of Physics Teachers (IAPT).
Each Olympiad consists of a five-stage rigorous selection process. It begins with a subject-specific National Standard Examination (NSE), a challenging test for which only the top 400-500 students from the 1st stage qualify. These students then appear in the Indian National Olympiads (INOs), where the top 40-50 students make it to month-long extensive selection camps that engage students in lectures by subject-experts and researchers, challenging problem-solving questions, and experimental sessions.
Olympiads on astronomy include analysis of astronomical data and night sky observations. The top four to six best-performing students (based on subjects) from the selection camps make it to the pre-departure training camps, where they prepare more.
Most countries mainly train their students to enhance their performance so as to create an impression of academic excellence. India initially started with a similar aim: to showcase our best talent to the world. India’s performance has steadily improved since then. Today, India’s aim is to spark curiosity and ignite young minds to take up careers in sciences or mathematics.
In the recent astronomy Olympiads, Iran performed better than India. Does it mean India’s education system needs to do more? Not as far as Olympiad performances are concerned!
Countries like Iran incentivise achievements at Olympiads, e.g., in the form of admission to a university, whereas India does not. More than winning a rank, the passion for a subject should drive students’ interest, says Aniket Sule, Associate Professor at HBCSE and president of the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA). Therefore, India has consistently stayed away from incentivizing performances.
The pie-chart below shows India’s stellar performance at the Olympiads so far, with each student winning at least a medal or an honourable mention. Some students have also received the best performance award for theoretical or experimental components of the International Olympiads. For context, some 8-10% of total number of students get gold, 15-20% students get silver and 20-30% get bronze. This year, in the Biology Olympiad, out of 305 students representing 80 countries, 29 received gold medals.
Gender representation
While India proudly boasts of its achievements, gender representation remains a challenge, particularly in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. In mathematics, feeder Olympiads like the European Girls’ Mathematics Olympiads (EGMO) have successfully encouraged more girls to participate; such programs have not been available for other Olympiads.
The root cause of fewer girls participating mainly lies in the social aspects of girls’ education. Sule adds: “If you look at the social realities of India, fewer parents of girls tend to allocate financial resources for training of girls compared to training of boys, and in the very first round of selection, the NSE (National Science Exams), which is a multiple choice exam, that difference in training matters.”
Impact of coaching centres
Along with improving gender representation, India struggles to capture young minds from geographically diverse regions in the Olympiads. A major reason behind this is the country’s coaching class system.
Coaching classes train students to crack the preliminary examinations leading to the selection camps. The training mainly focuses on correctly solving the Multiple choice questions (MCQs), by arriving at the correct option or eliminating the wrong options. However, most Olympiads require students to write longer, coherent answers.
Students extensively trained in such coaching centres often struggle to articulate their thought processes when arriving at the correct answers. But, with all major coaching centres based out of tier 1 cities, those students are more likely to crack the preliminary rounds and enter the selection camps.
It is observed that only 15-20 % of students from tier 2 or tier 3 cities make it to the selection round. For subjects like physics or chemistry, the syllabi and question patterns in olympiads are well-aligned with those of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE). Thus, students coming from big hubs of JEE coaching tend to perform better.
Mr. Sule explained, “In subjects like astronomy and mathematics, where the olympiads are not closely aligned with the JEE, we see students from smaller places, too. Students from interior parts of Bengal have been coming to camp quite regularly. In astronomy, I can recall students from various smaller places, including Bhusawal (in Maharashtra)”.
Many experts and educators are taking steps toward addressing the challenges in olympiads. One such initiative is the Olympiad Exposure Camps for teachers, organised by HBCSE, Mumbai. These are orientation camps for select teachers, who can pass on the information on the concepts, type of questions and the skills being tested to their students.
Mr. Sule said, “This has been going on for nearly 10 years now, but the impact is not as large as we hope”. To increase the representation of girls in astronomy, there is a plan for the upcoming round to have a supernumerary quota for girls only in the first round of selection. This might improve the chances of girls making it to the later stages, including the International Olympiads.
Educators also believe states should do more to ensure better participation in Olympiads. T V Venkateswaran, scientist and visiting professor at Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Mohali adds “Education is a state subject and more and more state governments must come forward. I know for example, the Tamil Nadu model school is taking a serious note and trying to get the school system take it up. They will need a few years to develop, but they are commencing.”
The true measure of success
Every year, India felicitates its International Olympiad medallists and honourable award winners. India has also set several records. For example, every Indian team member won a gold medal in the 2018 International Physics Olympiad.
However, for India, the medals and ranks at the international Olympiads do not indicate success. Instead, it is defined by the number of students who build their careers in the natural sciences.
Shriharsh Tendulkar represented India in the Astronomy Olympiads of 2002 and 2003. He is presently a faculty member of astronomy and astrophysics at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), TIFR, Pune.
Asilata Bapat represented India at the 2003 and 2005 editions of the Astronomy Olympiads and is currently a faculty in mathematics at the Australian National University. Many more Indian scientists and mathematicians to date owe it to the olympiads, irrespective of the stage until which they competed or the awards they won.
With many inspiring scientists and educators, India can do wonders to address all its challenges while acing Olympiad performances. Aspiring students need not pay exorbitant fees to join coaching centres. A rich collection of resources and question papers from Olympiads is available at a nominal cost or is freely downloadable from most nodal organisations’ websites. Efforts are also underway to create short YouTube videos on concepts in subjects like astronomy, which can be disseminated across the country to students preparing for the Olympiads.
(The author would like to thank Prof. Aniket Sule and Dr. T.V. Venkateswaran for their inputs)
Published - September 10, 2024 10:11 am IST
