There are a lot of reasons to be confident about Alabama’s state team this year.

First is the competition they faced.  Just three years ago it took 27 points to make the state team.  There were something like 13 students in Alabama who scored at least that high this year.  This year’s state test was tougher than last year’s (I’ve got substantial data for many students for comparison at this point) and it took 38 points to make the team (just as it did last year).

Great competition pushes us to higher peaks.

But I don’t think that tells the story.  I believe these students will perform relatively better at the national competition where the problems are harder.  I could say this opinion is based partially on the fourth place student scoring 6 on the recent AIME, but I would have said that anyway.  Each of this year’s team members has a passion for mathematics and problem solving.

During a recent practice session I noticed each of the students offering ideas to help with different problems.  They clearly have different strengths, and they are fully capable of teaching each other as they learn themselves.  These different strengths also raise their potential on a hard Team Round.

I hope the Team Round is very hard this year.  With four strong team members, I believe a hard Team Round would favor this Alabama team.

But here’s the reason I believe they will perform well: because they all seem to enjoy working hard on the problems.  They’re a very good team already, but they’ll be substantially better by May.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2011 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Alabama, Competitions, MATHCOUNTS, Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.