reversing a slide of recent years that had taken Iran out of the highest ranks of the Olympiads.
Iranian student teams ended up in 10th place in four of the five Olympiads—chemistry, math, physics and biology—and in 13th place in the informatics (computer) Olympiad. That was an average ranking of 10.6, substantially better than last year’s dismal 15.6 average, the worst since Iran started participating in the Olympiads.
Until 2005, Iran always averaged in single digits, as shown in the accompanying table. Since 2006, Iran has never returned to single digits.
Iran has classically done well by sending a team all of whose members were very good even though no one Iranian scored highest. For example, this year Iran’s five-student team in physics came in 10th. But its top student only finished 55th. The key was that its “worst” student came in 81st, much better than the lowest scorer on most other teams.
First place in physics went to the Taiwan team, whose students ranked first, third, fourth, sixth and seventh in the world.
Iran’s best performing student this year was Ali-Asghar Aghajani, who came in eighth in the world in chemistry, just a fraction of a point ahead of an American by the name of Konstantin Borisov.
The Olympiads were begun in the 50s and 60s as an Eastern bloc event. In the 1980s, as the Cold War wound down, other countries began to join in large numbers.
Overall, the scoring this year was dominated by China, with an average ranking of 2.0, and the United States, with a 3.2 average. Then the averages dropped to 6.0 for Taiwan, 6.4 for Singapore, 6.8 for Thailand, 7.2 for South Korea, 7.4 for Russia, 8.4 for Japan and 10.6 for Iran. Overall, it was a very impressive showing by Iranian students, even if it wasn’t up to the outstanding levels since in 1990s when, for example, the Iranian teams ended up in single digits in every one of he Olympiads for three straight years.
In physics, from 1995 through 2007, the Iranian teams always finished in the top seven. Then Iran stumbled to 23rd, 20th and 25th places the last three years before gaining 10th place this year.
It has often been pointed out that Asian teams tend to predominate. But it is more than that. Of the top four countries, China’s and Taiwan’s teams were, of course, comprised entirely of Chinese. But the Singapore teams were also largely comprised of Chinese ethnics and the American teams included such names as Rebecca Shi (first in the world in Biology), Shulin Ye, Charles Huanghong Du, Brian Zhang, Ante Qu, Joe Tung, Elmer Tan, Wenyo Cao, Johnny Ho and Albert Gu.
Country rankings are frowned upon by most organizers of these Olympiads. They view these as competitions between individuals and give awards only on an individual basis. The math Olympiad has conceded to the popular demand and now publishes country rankings, in part because some country teams were falsely reporting higher rankings back home than they really achieved.
In fact, this year the Iranian media uniformly reported that Iran’s chemistry team had ranked fourth in the world instead of 10th.
The Olympiads are open to high school students only. Many of Iran’s many winners have gone on to higher education in the West. A number of political figures complain that few of them ever return to the West and just add to the problem of the brain drain.