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 than students in other countries. No dice: they aren’t much more variable than the student populations in other countries, and a handful of comparably-sized nations with worse Olympiad performance are more variable. Another possibility is that, for some reason, there’s a fat right tail in Romanian educational performance. If this is true, it just doesn’t show up in any existing data. Given the fact that international assessments indicate Romania’s sampling tends to be population-representative, we should have a strong prior against this possibility. Romanian test scores tend to be distributed along a symmetrical bell curve.
Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews and using them as an explanation is problematic for two reasons. The first is that there are too few to realistically explain Romanian Olympiad performance. The second is that we know the identities of Olympiad participants from Romania, and they don’t seem to be Jewish.
Something else, something more mysterious, explains why Romania is such an outlier in international intellectual competitions. That thing is, in fact, the unique design of the Romanian educational system.
In the late 19th century, Romanian prince regnant Alexandru Ioan Cuza attempted to raise the status of the nation by instituting a mass literacy campaign centered around building free schools that children were compelled to attend. This effort was largely a failure, with literacy failing to break 50% by the 1930s. But World War II precipitated change. In 1948, Romania’s new governing communist party began to bring about serious educational reform at a breakneck pace.The Education Law of 1948 was passed to provoke a military-grade offensive against illiteracy, involving the mass participation of the literate from all walks of life in uplifting the poor, the abandoned, and those who simply shunned education. By the end of the 1950s, illiteracy was practically eradicated among Romania’s youth.
The education system that existed in Romania’s communist period was modeled on the system in place in the Soviet Union, and it included a fair helping of political propaganda in addition to physical labor. The system also overproduced schools, resulting in shoddy but widely available facilities dotting the country. Like the Soviet school system, Romania’s was marked by increasing lengths of compulsory education, poor availability of qualified teachers and educational supplies, high budgetary costs, and an extreme level of credential inflation.
After the fall of communism, the new democratic government went on to shutter many of these schools and to immediately lower compulsory schooling requirements to put an end to the bureaucratic nightmare that Soviet influence had saddled the country with. In the following years, how Romania wished to ration scarce governmental resources for education was a matter of intense debate, and out of that debate came a strong sentiment that, whatever the system, Romanian education would be structured competitively.
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