Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

Summary

Olympiads are international student intellectual competitions in which students from across the world go toe-to-toe answering questions in mathematics, physics, informatics, chemistry, and more. The best performers tend to be from countries like China, the United States, India, and Japan. But, somehow, the southeastern European country of Romania also frequently tops the list. Since 2020, Romania’s performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) has been nothing short of amazing. In 2022, Romania came in fifth overall, fourth in 2023, and twelfth in 2024. In 2023, Romania placed fourth globally and first in Europe at the International Physics Olympiad, seventeenth globally and third in Europe at the International Olympiad in Informatics, sixth globally and second in Europe in the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, first in the Balkan Mathematical Olympiad—which also included France, Italy, and the United Kingdom—and first in the Central European Olympiad in Informatics. Romania also performed well in the International Chemistry Olympiad and many others. It’s an understatement to call Romania’s skill in Olympiads merely “overperformance”. Romania’s lackluster performance in international assessments and its relatively small population size of just over 19 million people makes the things they do in Olympiads downright miraculous. Average Romanian educational performance is unimpressive. Romanian youth routinely perform below the average of OECD countries and near the bottom of the pack of European nations. Romania has a poor-to-mediocre showing whether you include or exclude migrants from the calculations, and its scores on assessments like the PISA aren’t low due to being tainted by bias in the examinations. Romania genuinely underperforms. But underperformance is not the impression you would get if you only knew of Romanian education from Olympiads. One possibility is that Romanian students have more variable performance on international assessments...