Hello,
I have dual citizenship (Taiwan and USA), and I currently study in an American high school located in Taiwan. I've already participated in the regional contest about 7 weeks ago and did pretty well, so I qualified for the national contest.
So now I'm practicing as much as I can for the national contest, but recently I was told that I could qualify for the training camp but not the national team for Taiwan.
I searched online for IOI rules and found this link on the IOI-2017 site: http://www.ioinformatics.org/rules/reg17.pdf. Here are some parts of it that stood out:
"A Contestant is a student who was enrolled in a school at a level not higher than secondary education, in the Country they are representing, for the majority of the period 1 September to 31 December in the year before IOI’n. Students who are studying abroad may represent the Country of their nationality."
Not only am I studying in Taiwan, I also have Taiwan citizenship, so I definitely fit this criterion.
"The main objectives to be accomplished by the IOI are:
To discover, encourage, bring together, challenge, and give recognition to young people who are exceptionally talented in the field of informatics;
To foster friendly international relationships among computer scientists and informatics educators;
To bring the discipline of informatics to the attention of young people;
To promote the organisation of informatics competitions for students at schools for secondary education;
To encourage countries to organise a future IOI in their country."
Later, I asked for clarification about why I was ineligible, which doesn't support the objectives shown above:
"The national teams are supposed to show that Taiwanese education is superior to other education systems. If a student from a foreign school represents Taiwan in an international olympiad, then it defeats the purpose. Thus, you are ineligible to represent Taiwan in international olympiads."
- Other countries, like USA, don't care about things like the statement above.
- The statement above only applies if the contestants perform well. Else, they should invite someone "with a different education system" (I don't know why it matters) to take the blame for not performing well.
- Which person at IOI would notice which school I came from?
- Which person at IOI who even noticed which school I came from would bother to know that my school provides American education?
- Which person at IOI who even noticed which school I came from and that my school provides American education would change their views about Taiwan?
- Why can't they credit my results (IF they are even good) to the training that I received in the training camp in Taiwan?
- Of course "Taiwanese education" and "American education" prepares all students for international olympiads (for example for informatics, by teaching topics like Dynamic Programming Optimizations or Heavy-Light Decomposition in school), and it's not the contestants' own hard work. Thus, the results for each country accurately reflects how successful the education system in that country is.
I don't really have that much experience or knowledge in everything mentioned above. Maybe IOI set a "loose bound" for the eligible contestants, and each country can set its own "tighter bound", so I came here to ask, what are your thoughts?
Hopefully, this can be a precedent that will be explained for all countries and contestants in the future.
