Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Math placement.

Sully, great thread.... I too have a DS8 in 2nd grade with fairly similar scores. He is underserved in his current public school's "upper math" class. For enrichment we have him in a local Math Circle at the University and EPGY at home. He is currently at the 5.6 grade level and trending towards 6th in EPGY. My wife and I both work so we squeeze in EPGY when we can. Question to all of you. At what level do you think it would be appropriate to transition him to AOPS Pre Algebra? I believe EPGY said end of 7th in their curriculum? I ordered the book and solution guide yesterday to take a peak:)

I am fascinated and amazed by all of your kids progress. Question, are you all fairly strong in math and able to go through these classes/lessons with your children yourself? We often watch the Kahn Academy video's on new subjects that he must learn. I find myself having to relearn many of the lessons myself:) I often wonder if I am doing my child a disservice(holding him back) by my own shortcomings in teaching and math. I was thinking about hiring a tutor. Would love to hear your thoughts.

DS says quite different, I am not able to compare.

DS did Intro to Number Theory via textbook. I read the online courses were different so we tried this one out (you can drop before the 3rd lesson and get a refund). DS said they do not use the book at all- similar topics but different descriptions, etc. He likes the online course very much so we plan to also repeat Intro to Counting and Probability and Intro to Geometry. I am happy to slow him down a bit.

I originally thought I could save by just having him self-study but am ok to pay if he finds online course useful.

Similar to another post, DS is working all challenge problems in the AoPS Algebra textbook. He is completing Algebra II in school and is solid in Algebra (AIME qualifier this year). I still thought it worthwhile to purchase the AoPS Algebra textbook to see if he is solid in Algebra. There are quite a few of the challenge problems in the Algebra book that give him some trouble.

We plan to get through the Algebra book and then do the online Intermediate Algebra, beginning in about April after AMC and hopefully AIME.

We haven't done EPGY, so I can't speak to that specific transition. However, I personally found the AoPS pre-Algebra book seemed to contain absolutely everything a child ought to have learned by that point from K on up. We came into it from grade 4, and most of the concepts were new, but well-explained and the problems worked you up from basic to seriously hard. My own experience is that you could do the pre-algebra instead of other courses (like grades 5-7!) to learn these materials, as long as you were able to take your own pace and spend as long as needed on the parts that were wholly new. You probably wouldn't want to try an AoPS on-line course without more pre-requirements though, as these move fast (i.e. a chapter a week, typically), and as I note in the previous post, it really is worth every minute you put in to working through all the harder problems in the text.


I'm a serious artsy, though I do have two years of university calculus from (egad) three decades back. I'm embarrassed to tell you how much I learned from the pre-Algebra book, never mind the Algebra. Even accounting for all I've forgotten, there's a ton there I never learned in the first place, especially in the whys and hows of things (which is why I LOVE AoPS - everything from first principles, everything for a reason, no rote processes). So I have to do the text/courses side-by-side with DS, and it's no small struggle to keep up. I assure myself that I am postponing dementia for a least a decade with this work! At some point he will truly leave me behind, but I'll keep going as long as I can. I can still out-compute him with ease, but he blows me away on all the conceptual bits...

My DD does the AoPS challenge problems in the book, Alcumus and the ones from the class.

IHO, the Alcumus ones are the easiest, the book ones sometimes make her stop and think but the hand graded one from the class almost always makes her stop and think.

Also, be sure to spend the extra money on the solutions manual as sometimes they reveal neat alternate ways of arriving at the same answer on the book problems.

Very good thought. DS often gets there a different route, or even using a totally different technique, so it's helpful to see how else the problem could be approached.

I will do the same in your shoes (i.e. stay with AOPS curriculum), no need backing off a great curriculum if she is doing well with it.

Re EPGY - my son did EPGY from 3rd up until Geometry. We had significant issues with their Geometry platform (proof environment) and then had a very bad experience trying to sort it out. Ultimately it was taking too long so we went to AoPS. I wish we had done AoPS from the start, although EPGY was much better than what he was doing at school.

We have not done the competition book yet, although he did do a weekend session for the AMC10 prep. We plan to do the full AMC 10 prep this year.