25/06/2019

Federal schools have the best performance in OBMEP.

Cerimônia de premiação da OBMEP 2017, durante o Congresso Internacional de Matemáticos (ICM), no Rio de Janeiro, em 2018 / Foto: Christhian Rodrigues/R2

Reproduction from the IMPA Science & Mathematics blog, from O Globo, coordinated by Claudio Landim.

Claudio Landim – Deputy Director of IMPA and General Coordinator of OBMEP

The tables below show the performance of schools in the second phase of the Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools (OBMEP) in 2018, by administrative dependency.

OBMEP has two tests and three levels, by schooling. Level 1 includes students in the 6th and 7th grades of elementary school; level 2 includes students in the 8th and 9th grades; and level 3 includes high school students.

All registered students take the first-phase exam, which consists of 20 multiple-choice questions. In 2018, there were 18,237,996 students from 54,498 schools in 99.7% of the country's municipalities. In each school, at each level, the 5% with the best scores qualify for the second phase. In the second-phase exam, students must solve six problems, divided into several items.

The Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad (OBMEP) was first administered in 2005, only to students from public schools. In 2017, it was extended to private schools. Available online, the test aims to identify students with mathematical talent. Solving the problems requires more reasoning, logic, and creativity than mathematical knowledge. However, a good background in mathematics will naturally contribute to better performance.

The maximum score on the second phase exam is 120. Low averages shouldn't be surprising. This is an Olympiad, with a high degree of difficulty. Identifying highly talented students requires ingenious problems. The last problems on the second exam – the sixth, in particular – and the last items on some others demand considerable insight. Despite this, every year and at all levels, students from public and private schools achieve scores above 110.

In each table, the first column indicates the administrative dependency, the second the number of schools registered in OBMEP in 2018. Note that the same school may appear in all three tables, as long as it has registered students at all three levels. The third column shows the number of students who qualified for the second phase exam, and the last column shows the average grade of those students.

Therefore, in 2018, 16,445 state schools enrolled level 2 students in the OBMEP. Of these, 136,821 qualified for the second phase. In the second phase, the average score of these students was 16.75 out of a possible 120 points.

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