@michelhenrion@YvesCoppieters@tgadisseux Prise de parole courageuse sur un domaine extrĂȘmement sensible, d'autant plus qu'il s'agit d'une sorte d'aveu d'impuissance.
"The IMO is probably the purest measure of human intelligence at the high school level"
The math/intelligence/IMO fetish running on this site is approaching peak stupidity.
1/ The competition suffers from a massive selection bias, with only about 0.0004% of recent age cohorts participating. Of course the selection process isn't random, and does measure something, but you'd have to be either extremely naive or extremely dishonest to call it "pure."
2/ Participants do receive a specific training, and not all training programs are created equal. There are certain things to learn, certain idiosyncrasies and tactics that change your odds of getting a medal from near-zero to substantially-above-zero. Again, this doesn't mean talent/intelligence/merit/whatever doesn't exist and anyone can take idiots and train them into gold medallists. This simply means, again, that the measure is far from "pure."
The clear geographic and historical patterns in IMO results are a strong indication that the process isn't pure.