Turns out the goal of finishing 3 years of BA in one year was not realistic. We finished BA 4 a few weeks ago though, and now are in chapter 2 of BA 5A. Some of the problems are very hard. The last problem of chapter 1 took us more than one hour.

I wish my daughter would have read the BA guide too. At first she loved the stories but already by BA 3B I found I had to remind her to read the guide. So I stopped buying the guide and only do the workbook. It works just fine.

DD10 took the 5-6 grade test. She had time to work on 25 problems and she did 20 correctly. She guessed for the last 5, all of them wrong :) I think hers is a great result in a very difficult test, especially considering she hasn't learned equations yet. Next year she will take the test at the same level and should be able to solve the problems that can be solved with equations much faster.

For example I am looking at the 2016 grade 5-6 tests. The US and Pakistani tests are identical. 7 off the problems on the Canadian test are not in the other 2 tests (and vice-versa).

Many of my friends kids are taking or have taken classes in the past. RSM does math the old russian way. That means not only the material is quite advanced for kids age, but also many of the teachers are from that part of the world. Those teachers are quite knowledgeable in math and demand that the students learn the math. The group of people that stay with RSM is quite self-selecting, it is quite comprised of either very smart kids and/or kids with very dedicated parents. I have seen a lot of kids drop out. I haven't sent my kids but I would make them try it if they had the time. As it is my kids already do too many activities so no RSM for them :)

Also check Pakistan's Math Kangaroo website. Their old tests seem to be match US tests better than the Canadian tests do.

I second the suggestion for RSM Olympiad. DD has done it and she likes it. Registration is open now.

I tried to afterschool DD with BA3 in 3rd grade but felt I had to stop since she was not able to solve many of the starred problems on her own. We finally restarted with BA3 this September while DD started 5th grade. She is doing very well and has learned a ton of new things that haven't been taught yet in her regular 5th grade math. We just finished 3D and started 4A. We work 30 minutes every weekday and 1 hour every free weekend day and solve every problem on the practice book. Although the decision to start late was kind of forced on me I have been thinking that it would be helpful for many children to start later rather than earlier. Some of the problems she is doing are really hard and they give her a lot of joy when she solves them. Had we been doing them 2 years ago, I would have to tell her the solutions or skip those problems altogether. In particular the last 2 chapters on 3D, the one on Estimations and the one on Areas are very hard. I have a degree in Physics and I remember struggling with estimations in college. And the chapter on Areas has 2 different proofs of Pythagoras's theorem! One of the reasons I am starting this thread is because I would like to keep a log of DDs advance with AOPS books. The goal is to finish all of BAs this school year. Not sure how realistic that goal is, but I will update anyway.

What book are you using? If I were doing AOPS Intermediate Algebra I would skip about half of the book since it is very specialized knowledge useful only for people who go to math Olympiad or want to become mathematicians. The contents of a regular intermediate algebra book on the other hand is very useful so I wouldn't skip anything. Higher order polynomials appear a lot in physics. I have a degree in physics and most of the exams where just exercices in polynomial manipulation. I suppose polynomials are used in engineering too. I.e. any time one needs to find eigenvalues of a matrix a polynomial might come handy. Quants that work in finance also use polynomials. And there is always the saying: You do it because it is beatiful not because it is useful. But I just suggested you skip half of a particular book if you are doing it, so take that saying with a grain of salt :)

Borac books are all very recent. The reason some of the books are missing is probably because they haven't published them yet. I have all the level 1 books so I can't comment for other levels but for level 1 books 1 to 4 are supposed to have the same complexity, they just cover different topics. But from practice I think that a higher numbered book is slightly more difficult than a lower numbered book.

My daughter placed 43rd in nation. We spent a lot of time preparing, for 4 months didn't do anything else but competition math. Based on pre-tests I was quite hopeful she would get more than 70 points but she got 51. I guess we would need to spend more than half hour per day if we want to get serious with math. Still I am not unhappy, I can see that now that we are back to regular math she is doing much better than before. And even in 43rd place her percentile is 64% which I think is not that bad.

Thanks a lot. According to your link dd is at the 86 percentile. That makes me very happy :)

Thank you! I also had an email from them which I found in the promotions tab after I went looking for it. The email tells me that my dd got a Bronze Award for her grade. It doesn't say how many problems she solved correctly or in what percentage does she fall. I guess I should be happy for my daughter but more details would be good to have.

I think it depends on you goals. My daughter in second grade does 30 minutes per day, just started MEP 3. She is very good at math but did not do as well as I had hoped in the Math Kangaroo competition (obviously haven't got the results yet but she will probably get about 55 points). I am keeping it like this for another year but if she doesn't get about 80 points next year I might increase the load to 1 hour per day.

Well, first we notice that only cubes on the edges of the big cube can have red and blue faces. The 12 edges have 32 small cubes altogether. Second we notice that since there is no small cube with 3 sides of same color, the only arrangement for colored faces of the big cube is that you have 2 opposite faces that have the same color joined by one other face of the same color. This means that there are 4 edges that are formed by 2 faces of same color. Of these 4 edges, the cubes on the corners have 3 colored faces so they will have both red and blue. Only the 2 cubes on the middle of these 4 edges have 2 colored faces of same color (either blue or red) so those 4x2=8 cubes should be excluded from the 32 cubes. So there are 32-8=24 cubes with both red and blue faces.