SLMO 2010

Sri Lanka Mathematical Olympiad 2010

Sri Lankan Mathematics Competition 2010 was held as scheduled on April 24, 2010 at 12 exam centers including Jaffna, Batticaloa and Trincomalee. Of the 3265 registered applicants 2844 sat the competition.

Once again it was a massive volunteer effort from the initial planning and setting of the paper to finally marking and mailing results to schools – some of the past IMO participants worked day and night. GRBR Gamlath, one of the Bronze medal winners last year, learned programming and created a database to handle admission cards and sort out marks. This time we paid invigilators, supervisors and exam coordinators provided by the Ministry of Education. This increased the cost of the competition substantially. But the ministry provided us exam centers free in all the provinces except Colombo. In Colombo we set up the exam centers.

SLMC 2010 paper yet again contained interesting and challenging problems. The paper was set, moderated, checked, translated and type set by 6 persons working for many hours without any payment. Nipuna R. Samarasekera, 2009 GCE Advanced Level island best in the physical science stream, obtained the highest score of 163 out of the maximum possible 190. The average of all those who sat the competition is 79.30. There are 147 High Distinction Certificate winners (cut off - 112), 136 Distinction Certificate winners (cut off - 103) and 69 Honorable Mention Certificate winners. Honorable Mention Certificates are awarded for good performances in the younger age groups. Cut offs for Honorable Mention Certificates are as follows: Born in 1994 - 100, Born in 1995 - 96, Born in 1996 - 90, and Born in 1997 – 86.

The following table gives final statistics. As you can see the percentage of attendance at Jaffna Exam Center, the biggest center, is 92.05%.

EXAM CENTRE		NUMBER APPLIED FOR THE EXAM				NUMBER SAT FOR THE EXAM				PERCENTAGE
		ENGLISH	SINHALA	TAMIL	TOTAL	ENGLISH	SINHALA	TAMIL	TOTAL	TOTAL
ANURADHAPURA		10	17	23	50	8	13	17	38	76.00%
COLOMBO	PET	94	233	42	369	72	190	34	296	80.22%
COLOMBO	UOC	91	180	7	278	72	131	7	210	75.54%
COLOMBO	UOM	65	159	39	263	54	134	32	220	83.65%
COLOMBO	UOSJP	25	117		142	21	98		119	83.80%
GALLE		52	230		282	50	210		260	92.20%
JAFFNA		159		457	616	145		422	567	92.05%
KANDY		157	184	212	553	133	156	198	487	88.07%
KURUNEGALA		93	165	10	268	84	151	10	245	91.42%
MATARA		4	187	1	192	4	167	1	172	89.58%
TRINCOMALEE			1	172	173		1	157	158	91.33%
BATTICALOA		31	10	38	79	27	8	37	72	91.14%
TOTAL		781	1483	1001	3265	670	1259	915	2844	87.11%

Some were absent for various reasons including changing their minds about the competition after getting their admission cards and giving priority to something else on the day of the competition. Admission cards of those who registered before the extended deadline were delivered on time but some schools did not attend to them on time – At one school the envelope containing the admission cards was on the principal’s desk unattended until one parent inquired and insisted that it was delivered. But we attended to all those who did not get admission cards before the competition – some were not aware of the competition date though it was mentioned in the application forms, both private and school; poster; brochure and covering letter.
There were 2657 school applicants from 149 schools and 608 private applicants. The following table gives names of the top schools and their performance according to the performance of their school applicants:

	High Distinction	Distinction	Honorable Mention	SLMCC 2010 Selections	IMC Stage II selections
Maliyadeva College	10	3	7	1	2
Rahula College	9	1	0	3	0
Colombo Royal	11	5	0	3	2
Nalanda College	5	8	0	1	0
Museaus College	2	3	1	2	0
Matara Sujatha	6	3	4	1	2
Jaffna Hartley	7	2	8	2	2
Jaffna Nelliady	3	2	2	0	1
St. Bridget’s	2	2	5	1	0
Colombo Vishaka	3	5	1	0	2

To see the full table, go to School Summery.
We thank and appreciate the teachers at all the schools that participated for motivating the students to take part in this competition.
It is interesting to see the age wise breakdown of all participated.

Year Born	The number participated
1990	30
1991	201
1992	520
1993	247
1994	864
1995	532
1996	413
1997	30
1998	6
1999	1

Born in 1991 and 1990 are students after GCE ALs – there should have been more participants from this category. It is heartening to see lot of younger participants. Hopefully they will grow stronger in mathematics with the competition.

Hope the students enjoyed the competition paper and they would pursue the problems at home and school by discussing, thinking and trying again and again. Remember that in the exam hall problems are meant to be solved in various ways. Intuition and guesswork is always helpful and one should look for patterns and clever manipulations. Sometimes one can find the answer by eliminating wrong answers. One gains more confidence and develops mathematical talent by solving more problems. At home your work regarding a particular problem does not end by solving that problem. You should look for other solutions, generalizations, interconnections between problems you have solved before, and find and read related mathematical literature.

Conducting this competition was quite difficult. We had a lot of support from the Ministry of Education. We especially thank Mrs. Sandya Leelaratne, Deputy Director of Education, Science and Mathematics Branch, Ministry of Education for her support. We would also like to thank the following exam coordinators provided by the Ministry of Education: Mr. Nihal Alahakoon, Ms. Suwineetha De Silva, Mr. Saundharajah, Mr. Munundan, Mr. Saluwadana, Ms. Dhushma de Silva, and Ms. Madhuka Fernando. Mr. Sanjeeva P. Muttiah coordinated with these exam coordinators. Former IMO participants, and students and junior staff from University of Moratuwa and University of Colombo gave a lot of support. Mr. Kapila Silva of the Department of Mathematics, University of Sri Jayawardenepura coordinated the exam center at UOSJP.

Look at the following pictures taken at St. Peter’s College Exam Center after the competition was over:

Here former IMO participants are working hard to ensure that everything is ok before the competition paper goes to the printer:

Marking close to 3000 answer sheets manually was not easy. More than 30 examiners marked for two days to finish marking, again without pay! – Each answer sheet was marked twice by two examiners. After marking, marks were entered into the database and they were checked again against the original answer sheets.

Here they are checking out the final sorting out of the marks to see who is at the top: