cont'd from before (kulaks): I think viewing exam success as meritocratic is embedded in the mentality and will be difficult to dislodge. Whenever I talk to Romanians, they find the current system "fair".

A thought: a really nice book I read "Peasants under siege" made the case that the Romanian peasant mentality (and let's be honest, we were a country of peasants until recently) is that hard work = success. Outrage at kulaks didn't really work in Romania.

That's a very good and tough question. I am leaning towards "by chance", because this system has been in place in times when studying abroad was either 1. impossible, or 2. was not as difficult as today.

I had to look up the "Magurele laser", I have to admit. The name is so good, it sounds made up. It almost sounds like "Falansterul de la Scăieni", or something like that.

I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying the current system, if you buy my argument, does maximize something. Namely, admissions to top schools abroad. There are reasons why this may be desirable. I'm not arguing that it's socially optimal, of course. I'm just saying there is a logic to it.

Sure, but Romania is a country of 20 million people with very low educational attainment by most standards. I'm not sure that in expectation, if you randomly draw Fields medal winners, you would expect Romania to have one.

In fact conditional on Western unis existing and being very selective, it does seem like it could be a good strategy to just max out on signaling high ability via Olympiads in order to insure that a lot of HS students get admitted. Then, they egt the best possible education.

I agree. Counterfactuals are very hard... Especially when the two comparison groups (Western countries vs Romania) are different on so many dimensions... But when you have resources that are very rationed, like in Romania, if your goal is to produce elites, it might actually be quite efficient.

I am also in early talks about writing an article about this. :) Yes, I agree, empirical evidence is needed.

Oh, and I agree in principle that there's too much overspecialization and too early. The interesting thing is that humanities is actually more overspecialized, in the sense that science students have a lot of language classes, but humanities students have almost no science training.

As for Romania's performance in the Olympiads: it really is a lot like sports in communism. You have quasi-professionalism in some countries like Romania competing with what essentially amount to a hobby in the West. Of course the former system will have good results.

I strongly agree with you, with one exception. I do believe that Olympiads create scientific elites. However, the irony is that those elites are almost exclusively trained abroad. The Olympics is just a signaling mechanism for these very good students to gain admission to elite Western universities.

There are also other issues related to your point. Namely, what people call "teaching to the test" (for the bac). Also, I find the Romanian bac and admission exams woeful. I think they should test reading comprehension of new texts, not ask about memorized "classic", and have subject lists.

A very good point. Not only does the Romanian system track by ability, but also places students in highly-specialized tracks. My coauthors and I are currently working on a project comparing the effects of the different types of tracks (real, uman, tehnologic) on different outcomes, including non-cog

... footage cuts to Brodeur playing the puck behind the net.

It's also tough because Cyprus has many Russians, Ukrainians and Romanians immigrants, so it doesn't really narrow it down.