As part of the ‘golden batch’ of NYPS that swept all the olympiads in 2004, I believe I can share some experiences primary olympiad students face.


The first competition of the year was the RI math competiton. The NYPS math teacher gave us past year papers to solve and picked the top 8. We had never saw this kind of problems before, so we rushed in blindly. In that sense, we had to rely on our wits to solve the questions (we knew gauss theorem, but that was it).

Our team of 8 ended up with the top 3 spots (I was 3rd) and 7 in the top 15, and this domination was preserved the whole year.

I did try IQ training and found it too easy. All those math ‘schools’ generally teach little tricks and try to impress little kids, but it can only go so far. I remember there was a Sakamoto world competition, where students from Sakamoto all over Asia were coming in to take part. I took part in it for fun and finished 2nd behind a Korean (and might have won if I remembered how many days there are in a month).

Perhaps training now has advanced, but in my opinion, what they can do is give familiarity with problems (its like a ten year series of olympiad kind of thing), but they cannot guarantee success.

Furthermore, in secondary school, the problems become much more varied and harder to ‘memorise’. Its there where talents emerge out of nowhere (no SMOPS or whatever, and finishing strongly in SMO, for instance) and those who really put in a lot of individual hard work shine.

So yeah, send your child for training if you want a platinum to beef the portfolio, but to really suceed in math, one needs a lot of talent, a lot of hard work, or both.

I took abacus and mental sums training when i was in K1 untill P1 with a training centre in orchard road.


We took exams with grades from 10 being the lowest to 1 being the highest. When i stopped in P2, i had a grade 1 in abacus (something like 8 digits8digits in 1 minute to pass) and a mental sums duan wei (the grade after grade 1, 6 digits6digits in 1 minute to pass) I found division and subtraction the easiest for obvious reasons, while multiplication was the hardest.

Im now 17 and rusty, but I dare say i can still mentally compute 3 digit*4digits in 1 minute. I would say that it did whet my appetite for math, and make me more interested in math.