Benefits of Competitions

A toolbox filled with academic skills but lacking practical application opportunities can leave students unprepared for real-world challenges.

Competitions offer outlets for a brighter future! At The Actuarial Foundation (TAF), we host two academic competitions. Our middle school content, Hardest Math Problem (HMP), and our high school competition, Modeling the Future Challenge (MTFC). At TAF, we understand the importance of math proficiency. We are lucky to partner with the Institute of Competition Sciences (ICS) who helps us manage both these programs. As expected in competition management, ICS understands the importance that competitions can bring to valuable education.

• Competitions promote communication skills: Whether verbally or written, competitions require students to communicate well. The winners of our Hardest Math Problem are chosen not only based on getting the correct answer mathematically, but how clearly and concisely they can explain the steps taken to arrive at their answer. Being able to explain math is a new level of understanding in the learning process than just being able to compute steps. Similarly, within our Modeling the Future Challenge, students need to be able to communicate their identified problems, risks, and mitigation strategies through their project. Not only are they communicating their work with a volunteer actuarial mentor that is provided to them and to the judges, but they are learning to work with teammates. Being able to effectively communicate your intentions and have strong writing skills are necessary soft skills for future college courses and a successful career in almost every field.
• Participating in competitions helps to build resilience: Participating in a competition is a challenge for all students. They are difficult and require commitment. While many competitions, including ours, give participation prizes and/or certificates, they aren’t as rewarding as actually winning. So why participate? The process of participating is meant to be a rewarding and learning experience of its own. Students learn that it’s important to take risks, to try new and sometimes difficult things, and that it’s okay not to be perfect at everything. We all are learning by making mistakes, and it’s important for students to learn this early on and to keep trying.
• Students who compete learn time management: Like any extracurricular activity, academic competitions require good time management skills. Students need to devote time not only to attending the event or completing the project, but they need to pay attention to deadlines and devote time to practice. For both our competitions, we provide many student resource to help students prepare, such as practicing their problem solving skills by working through sample problems. We also provide suggested timelines for both students and teachers to help them plan. Learning to manage time and prioritize activities in middle and high school will go a long way to setting students up for success in college and real life.
• Competitions bridge the gap between the classroom to the real world: An emerging and prevalent type of competition in the 21st century are synthesis-based competitions rather than static knowledge-based competitions. Students get to live out their favorite question (“When are we ever going to use this [insert concept]?”) and bridge the gap between the (seemingly) abstract concepts of the classroom. In the competition framework, they figure out how to engage with the real-world nature of the competition scenarios and figure out which skills they know might apply to solving the problem they are faced with, or if they need to seek additional knowledge and skills. For example, in the MTFC, students are faced with defining their own project within a given framework and identifying data, the math concepts needed to analyze and model that data, and then drawing conclusions from their findings.
• Students who participate in academic competitions have unique opportunities for growth from objective constructive feedback: Students are often very familiar with the people who are evaluating their academic performance (with good reason – the relationship between teachers and students fostering safe learning environments is essential). Participating in competitions brings in an unfamiliar, objective, authentic audience who are evaluating student submissions (in the case of the MTFC, experienced actuaries evaluate the student team submissions). Students may or may not even see the judges who are evaluating their work. This can be a chance for growth with conversations to be had between the teachers and/or adults in the student’s life to help them work through the important future career skill of receiving constructive feedback from judges or working through potential disappointment with their support community. Teachers and parents can support the student by helping them translate feedback (that they did not have to give) for future learning opportunities. Since competitions like TAF’s MTFC and HMP have opportunities for students to participate over multiple grades, students value the feedback and opportunities to grow from one year to the next.

Extracurriculars of all kinds are great for student development. If you haven’t already, learn more about our Hardest Math Problem and Modeling the Future Challenge. This blog is written by Nichole Semprit from TAF and Moriah Sanya from ICS, who are both former teachers. Nichole, Moriah, and the rest of the team at ICS look forward to seeing the great work that you can do!