“Romania has received the most gold medals in Olympiads.”
(Note – Olympiads = school contests; we’re not talking about Sports Olympics here)
There are some good reasons why Romania has a lot of very good results in school Olympiads.
- Why Romania Excels in International Olympiads;
- Why Romania excels in international Olympiads | Hacker News;
- Why is the IQ in Romania so low, but the performance so high? : r/AskRomania.
I think there might be another overlooked factor.
Let’s say you really like Physics, as a student/pupil. You learn, do efforts on this, study hard all things about Physics. But if you want to win National or even International contests, you need to focus a lot on the topic – perhaps skip some school days, only learn Physics, focus most of the time on Physics.
You can do such a thing in Romania, as I see it, much easier than it would be in a Western European system. If you go to a Western Europe school and say “I’m preparing for a contest, I won’t go to school for some weeks”, this will likely be unacceptable, while in Romania there might be some unofficial solutions for such a thing.
Taking shortcuts might bring you the medal, but it might not be focused on the overall formation of students.
