We’re in the midst of math contest season here. If you are not familiar with how this goes, the MAA runs a sequence of math contests that are used in selecting the members of the US team for the International Math Olympiad. The first contest in the sequence is called the AMC, and it took place about a month and a half ago.

The MAA does not have a lot of resources, and many tens of thousands of students participate in this contest. Also, students can be pretty bad at filling out the headers of their Scantron forms. So it is always a struggle for the MAA to wrangle all the data from all the tests. Since qualification for the second round is based on student performance on the first round, the MAA needs to do a bit of psychometrics to make sure that everything is balanced. They probably also need to take a few other steps to clean up their results as well.

If you look at the perfect scores report for the AMC 10A from 2019, there are currently 22 entries on the list. Several of these entries look like placeholder data. For example, there is a “J. BOX” from “MAA AMC School of Mathematics.” There are also several who are listed as being from “William Penn Demonstration HS” (which is closed) and whose names are suspiciously similar to the names of charaters from an anime.

Our students, of course, are going absolutely nuts about all this. They have come up with some very complicated conspiracy theories about how this might have happened. Many dismiss the idea of general incompetence with placeholder data in favor of elaborate trolling and nefarious cheating.

The second round of the competition wrapped up yesterday, so the MAA has several weeks to reveal the list of the 200 or so students who move on to the next stage of the competition. We’ll see if any of the placeholder students end up qualifying.