Three things:

1. Your first link is dead.

2. Probabilistic methods are awesome.

3. The whole application process thing seems shady. Very shady. They really ought to come up with some sort of clear cut algorithm for this year or next year at the absolute latest if they're really unsure what their "applicant" pool will be like. 43,000 dollars and a nebulous application process could easily get in the way of their ability to establish a decent reputation.

All three links worked for me.

I'm unclear as to how the application is shady -- I don't think they are charging a participation fee, so it's hard to see how this could be viewed as a scam... Do you mean it's unclear what to do, or that the metrics for choosing the students are unclear, or that people might be afraid to sign up because the whole thing doesn't look legit? (Obviously, I can attest that it's legit, but is there something specific about the website that needs to be changed to make the legitimacy of the effort clear?)

Has the forum it's in been made public? I can't find it in the forum list, and the topic link doens't work for me either.

I thought it looked legit.

First link is bad to me also, I got error message:

The topic or post you requested does not exist, Click here to return to the index (I was login when I got the error message).

The link is ok to you, it may be you are admin.

Oops... rrusczyk forgot to set the permissions when he created a new forum. I (hopefully) fixed it, so try the link now.

A girls' award? This exclusiveness seems rather inappropriate to me... it seems to suggest... Such separations seem to... degrade girls/women in mathematics? See Tanya Khovanova's http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=87.

I read recently in ACM TechNews about the American Psychological Association doing a study on girls in science. The study found that females are underrepresented because of the stress of tenure-seeking at the same time as one has small children. Males tend to be more likely to become well-established before having children; females have a biological imperative to have children earlier, and so go with unscientific careers.

Thus, since females are less likely to go into science, we should try to recruit more of them if our goal is to have less imbalance of the genders in the sciences. This is a good goal from a purely selfish science guy standpoint: for procreation (and thus having more children raised in sciency homes), I think it's important to have a spouse/partner-in-childraising whose interests and expertise overlap your own somewhat, and more females in the sciences means more potential spouses or partners by this criterion.

By shady I mean that you're going to be accused of having some sort of agenda above and beyond the participation of girls in science and mathematics (which people are going to have issues to begin with anyway). I found no clearly stated objective criteria for "acceptance" to the competition despite that there are many logical ones that come to mind (first three hundred "applicants" [in which case this should be a registration form], highest AMC scores [per test], highest AMC scores per grade, highest AMC scores per geographical region [e.g., East, West, South, and Midwest defined by state of residence]). You clearly have or will have to come up with a process. It should be made public if you want your contest to be perceived as fair.

How is this different from applying for any scholarship? (I refer to the vague selection criteria, not the gender issues.)

Well, first, searching the website's main page mentions "contest" not "scholarship." Contests are generally things that people would like to be able to perceive as fair. Second, you're offering cash prizes. The scholarships I've won were not cash prizes, but funds payable only directly to a university.

But, I must say I'm very surprised by your response. Do you view this as a scholarship?

I'm still puzzled -- you don't expect scholarships to be fair? Or college admissions?

No, this isn't a scholarship, but it's not at all clear to me that there's really much of a difference.

Also, it's not clear to me what you think could be perceived as unfair -- do you think the site implies the *contest* will be unfair, or merely the selection process. If the latter, I again ask how this differs from a scholarship or application to a selective college or any other sort of selective process that doesn't have very clear, precise guidelines.

(FWIW, I believe that they are being vague about exactly what the criteria are because they want to make sure they get enough people, not because they want to be restrictive.)

Finally, I would be a lot more concerned about this if people had to pay to apply, or if the application process were arduous, but I don't think either is the case.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough about the selection process. To a first approximation, here will be our algorithm:

(1) Discount AMC 10 scores by 15 points.

(2) Sort all the scores.

(3) Choose the 300 students with the highest scores.

The numbers 15 and 300 are parameters that we will tinker with.

Our site currently says: "We expect to invite approximately 300 girls. We will have separate cutoffs for the AMC 10 and AMC 12 contests. By May 31, 2009, we will announce the score cutoffs.". I thought from that wording it was clear that we were selecting based purely on scores. But I'll see if I can make the words clearer.

-- Ravi "Shady" Boppana

@Ravi B: ah, in the FAQ; that clears things up. Thanks for the quote. You may was want to consider adding something like, "Selection will be based solely on the basis of (grade) and AMC scores." (Grade is in parentheses because it's not quite necessary given your process, but there's an implicit link between grade level and AMC tests.) Also, in case it was unclear, nothing ad hominem was intended. Your process looks about the best that you can do. You are unfortunately in ground the AMC won't venture into by converting AMC10 scores to AMC12 scores, but there's little you can do given that the proportions of your applicant pool taking any given test (including the A and B) likely won't be similar to the proportions the AMC sees.

@rrusczyk: Do I expect scholarships to be fair? Not really, unless they're structured like a contest. For example, the Siemen's Award for Advanced Placement is essentially a contest: they ask the College Board for the male and female student still in high school with the most 5's on eight AP tests. Contrast with corporate merit scholarships, where corporations generally give scholarship only to their employee's children (which is ok) and tend to give scholarships to "diverse" students when the number of eligible students exceeds the number of scholarships they're giving. Is that last part fair? Not really. And scholarships awarded based on applicants' essays I definitely do not consider to be fair.

Do I expect college admissions to be fair? Absolutely not. It's necessarily a crapshoot by virtue of the problems with comparing students. Further, the issues associated with selecting a class as a whole is not clear. For example, compare the gender ratio of MIT and Caltech. Which school is "fair"? (Disclaimer: I will not argue for either approach.) Add ethnic issues into the mix, and it's even more treacherous. (This isn't to say colleges don't try to be fair. Quite the contrary, I expect them to do their best to be fair. However, I do not envy admissions officers.)

As for where unfairness could arise, I really didn't think it would be unfair, just perceived as unfair. (edit: I mean the selection process, not the contest.) The question the USACO people always get about their training camp is, "Where are the girls?" Fortunately, you won't have to deal with that. Instead, if my observations of two summers at Mathcamp are any indication (they're not giving out a bunch of money though, so they're not going to get into trouble with local news people or angry parents, for example), you'll have to deal with questions of ethnic diversity that would be much easier to answer if the exact process you used was publicly available (the FAQ, I think, is reasonably adequate; this was my concern before I was aware of the quote in the FAQ). You could, for example, be implicated of guessing ethnicity from names and discriminating when people discover that you have selected three hundred asians and caucasians.

tcs09 -- I think I don't understand what you mean by "fair". You seem to be using it to mean "well-defined" or "non-arbitrary", which is not how I would typically use it. If that's what it means, then I see what you're talking about (and, from his post, I think Ravi B does too). By this same standard, then, would you call the AMC selection process for the USAMO "unfair"? It's no more well-defined, and largely for the same reason -- they have to see the distribution of scores on tests before they can draw lines. (And we spend an enormous amount of time discussing this at every AMC Advisory Board meeting.)

ah, you're right. I am using "fair" rather inconsistently. The AMC is fair_1 in that it only uses data that it should. It is not necessarily fair_2 (arbitrary) because of the differences between the four AMC tests, and two AIME tests, and how to use those two tests to determine selection for the USAMO. But they do the best they can at being fair_2, so no one really has a right to complain. Essay contests are often not fair_1 in that they tend to bias towards the reader's/readers' own views, rather than how well written or how original the essay is. College admissions may or may not be fair_1 depending on what you think of affirmative action, using my point before. A better example with college admissions might be that colleges factor where your relatives went to college into your college decision.

I think we're on the same page. And don't get me started on legacy admissions...