By Pang Qi

Over 80 percent of the 11,050 people polled in an online survey want reform or cancellation of China’s tutorial education for the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the China Youth Daily reported Tuesday after its Social Research Center conducted the survey last week.

Among those surveyed, some 78 percent agreed that there was a tide of students rushing to study for the IMO. Nearly one third admitted they had the experience of learning for it, and over a quarter have plans to send their children for IMO classes.

The survey shows that the principal reason for students’ attending IMO classes –nearly 75 percent –is that they provide a shortcut to schools of higher grades, while only around 8 percent regard the phenomenon as because of students’ interest in math.

Despite the tide, over half of the respondents feel that the drawbacks of China’s IMO education outweigh its advantages. And, one fifth said that its pros and cons were evenly balanced.

Wang Yinuo, a Chinese parent whose child just entered kindergarten, is already considering sending the kid to IMO class in future. However, she was not sure whether the class would help the child’s growth.

"I don’t want to put more pressure on the kid, especially when he’s not interested in math," she said, "but he will fall behind the others if he lacks the IMO education, as other students will study it and get better chances than my kid."

He Yuhui, a math teacher at the elementary school of Wei River Electric Power Plant in Shaanxi Province who also taught IMO classes, said that the IMO classes are attended "most crazily" when children are in elementary school, and the students of grade six –the final year of primary school –make up the majority.

According to the teacher, parents and the society together created the flood of students. He explained that many good middle schools hold separate exams, which often include the IMO skills, to select prospective students.

“Education resources are not distributed evenly in China, making parents push their children to the good schools", said He.

He also told the Global Times that middle school students who attend the IMO classes do so mostly because winning IMO competition awards earns them extra marks in gaokao, China’s national college entrance examination. But this rule has been canceled in many places, and therefore the middle school students’ IMO classes can be “completely canceled".

But Xu Liang, a freshman in Zhejiang University, told the Global Times that he took the IMO classes throughout the primary and middle school life because of his interest in it. Xu considers that the classes taught him a way of thinking, “and my math marks are always high", he said.

However, Xu revealed that none of his IMO classmates got extra marks in gaokao, because they failed to win awards.

Ren Xinwei, Principal of Changzhou First Middle School in Jiangsu Province, told the China Youth Daily that China’s education system of IMO is problematic. “Our education has made IMO a twisted business, which is now over-utilitarian and commercialized," he was quoted as saying.

But Liu Pengzhi, head of the high school attached to Renmin University, stated at a meeting this January that the IMO itself had been over-demonized.