Dear Math coordinators,

We've finally finished scoring this October's OSU math contest, and the results are now available at

http://www.math.okstate.edu/system/files/results_hsc2011.pdf

or from our contest web page,

http://www.math.okstate.edu/hsc2011 .

Congratulations to the winners, and to all who participated!

Our staff will mail detailed results to all the participating schools this week; in the meantime, if you'd like me to try to extract your school's results from our spreadsheet I will attempt to do so.

A couple of notes:

* James Rowan of St. Mark's has pointed out that, in problem 11, it is possible to make 8 squares out of 17 toothpicks if one uses three dimensions. While we had intended the problem to take place in the plane, this is a legitimate interpretation, so we're counting this answer (E) as correct. I had to make the correction by hand, and consequently only looked at students who were close to the leaderboard.

* Because round two is no longer counted toward individual scores, there are a lot more ties. We're using question 25 as a tiebreaker, then question 24 as a secondary tiebreaker, and so on. The posted order within each tie was determined this way.

* Having run the contest for two years now, and looked at some historical results, I've concluded that the winners will almost always all come from a very small collection of schools. This is a little unfortunate, in that I'd like every contestant, or at least every school, to believe that they have some chance to win. So I've used the OSSAA Academic Bowl classifications to break schools into three groups: Everyone; "Class 6A" (which excludes statewide magnets and elite private academies, but includes the OSSM regional centers); and "Class 3A" (which includes only schools listed in Class 3A and below by OSSAA). I like this basic model, but have no idea whether or not the implementation is sensible. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

* The score for each team is determined by adding the four individual scores (for a possible total of 100) to the team score (out of 100) for a possible total of 200 points. This means that teams with fewer than four students are at a significant disadvantage. We deal with this during the contest by matching smaller groups up, to the greatest extent possible. What, if anything, should be done about it when results are announced? (This year, the team of Anna Zhao and Benjamin Zhao (OSSM - OKC) scored 103 points; a naive extrapolation suggests that with two similar teammates they'd be very close to the leaderboard.)

* Many schools brought more than one full team, and in fact OSSM-OKC and St. Mark's would have dominated team standings almost as thoroughly as they did the individual standings if I'd posted all those scores. So I decided to list only the highest-scoring team from each school.

* Many schools brought more than one full team, and sometimes these teams chose to identify themselves with a nickname. These were frequently silly but as far as I can tell never inappropriate, so I've chosen to preserve them for the winners.

Next year perhaps some of this can be automated, making the results available more quickly.

Again, congratulations to all who participated, and we hope to see many of you next fall.

Jeff Mermin