Some Misconceptions in Physics Olympiads

14 Aug 2025 - 5007 words

Last updated 14 Aug 2025

Having recently competed for the last time in high school physics olympiads, I feel like it’d be useful to try to distill some of what I’ve learned to other people. So I’m making a series of posts. This one is about common misconceptions people have about the process, from getting started to winning the international olympiad.

Some brief background

If you don’t know what physics olympiads are, here’s a brief primer. During the Cold War, the Eastern bloc of countries set up international competitions in math and science for high school students, which gradually spread in influence as Western countries began to participate. Nowadays, these competitions are the most prestigious math and science contests in the world for high schoolers. Each participating country sets up its own selection process for the team it sends to the international competition. I’ll mostly be talking about the United States’ selection process for the International Physics Olympiad.

The US first sent a team to IPhO sometime in the 1980s, but the competition was pretty obscure until the 2010s. Math olympiads had gradually risen in prominence, and high school math enthusiasts started to realize other olympiads existed as well. Furthermore, a disproportionate amount of olympiad students were being admitted to MIT, and the college admissions sphere (like r/ApplyingToCollege) started to notice. This brings us to today, where the average person thinking about doing physics olympiads (in the US) is a young high school student wondering how to boost their college apps profile.

Now, this student tends to lack knowledge about the process: what doing physics olympiads actually entails, what it gives you, and how to actually do it. My goal is to point out some common mistakes to avoid.

Misconceptions

Kevin Zhou has very good advice for beginners that lists a lot of common pitfalls. I’ll try not to tread too much of the same ground.

Why you are doing this in the first place

It will be good for college admissions

Why have physics competitions gotten more popular in the US? I don’t think it’s because of a newfound appreciation for understanding the laws of nature. Instead, the rise in interest is because people think college admission officers want to see it. Which is fine, I want more people to participate in these competitions! So it’s a shame that “it will be good for college admissions” isn’t actually true. A lot of students are going around asking “is USACO gold more prestigious than AIME” and that sort of thing, like there’s an objectively ranked list of every single high school accolade you can have that AOs consult every time they read an application. In reality, a typical AO at a T20 institution probably only vaguely knows that the USAPhO is a physics exam. You should not expect getting a USAPhO medal to make or break your application; indeed, all it usually does is signal “this person is interested and decent at physics.”

Now, there is an apparent exception here; an overwhelming majority of the US Physics Team (top 20 on USAPhO, not the same as the US IPhO team, which is the 5 people then selected at the training camp) end up at MIT. I have to admit that if you do qualify for the training camp, you have a very good chance of getting in. However, you need to think about how many other factors there are. For starters, many of the people on the team were already quite impressive in domains outside physics when they qualified. Next, MIT is looking for the sorts of people who have the motivation to learn and deeply understand physics, not for people who want to get into MIT. In my experience, people who don’t have any motivation but college rarely end up actually qualifying. Finally, the majority of people who are admitted into MIT haven’t ever done olympiads! I’ll conclude by asking people who really want to go to MIT to consider what exactly they’re hoping to get out of it, and how exclusive that thing is to MIT.

A note for international students: if you’re hoping to get into MIT, it does seem like qualifying for the international olympiad is genuinely your best shot in. I wish it weren’t this way, but that’s how it is. Everything else I said remains true though.

Physics competitions are easier than math

On the order of one hundred thousand people do math competitions in the US. In contrast, around five thousand people take the F=ma exam. There’s an obvious conclusion: “I should do physics instead of math, because it’s easier and there’s less competition.” I don’t think this is actually obvious.

Is physics actually easier? My answer is that the intuitions trained in math and physics competitions are mostly uncorrelated; doing lots of olympiad math will not improve your USAPhO score and vice versa. So I don’t think it makes sense to say that one thing is easier to learn than another¹. A common sentiment is that learning physics seems to be faster. However, I think this is because you usually start learning physics after a decade of learning other things first, gradually getting better at learning itself. Of course, people also learn different things at different rates. My final comment is that there is simply less to learn in olympiad physics than in olympiad math. You can just attribute this to the IMO and IPhO syllabuses being what they are, but I think an underlying reason is fundamental differences between math and physics and what a good introduction to each looks like². Anyway, this means that for a given amount of content covered, you feel like you’ve learned more of the physics, and you have in fact covered a bigger proportion of the syllabus. So this is why it’s possible for people to go from almost no knowledge to the IPhO team in a year, whereas it’s unheard of for the IMO nowadays. (Possibly because the US IMO selection process itself is a year long.)

The more fundamental question is, why does all this imply you should do physics instead of math? It has to do with that “competition” part. So I will admit that there’s obviously less competition in physics olympiads. Why does this make doing physics more desirable? Well, if your goal involves looking good relative to everyone else, then less competition is what you want. It does take less effort to qualify for IPhO than IMO, and to the mind of outsiders and admissions officers, they have the same status of “wow that sounds like something very impressive.” (Actually, they’re more aware these days that not all int olys are equal.) All I’ll say is that I don’t think it’s very worthwhile to try to impress people who aren’t able to tell how impressive things actually are.

It will impress other people

Who are these other people? First, maybe around a million people in the US even know what the physics olympiad is. The simple reality is that the vast majority of people do not have any real grasp on what your accomplishment means. If you want to impress such people, there are activities that capture much more of society’s attention in proportion to the effort that they require (like high school research. Don’t get me wrong, it gets miniscule attention as well; most of the things that popular society pays attention to are actually extremely hard, like professional sports.)

It’s perfectly natural to try to signal things by doing physics olympiads³. My contention is that if you are trying to look cool (lmao) or smart or whatever there are usually better signals. (Some of them even involve becoming cool/smart in the process of acquiring them!)

Paid courses are good

If you live in certain regions of the US, you may find it natural to prepare for the olympiad by taking classes or getting tutoring. Doing this will probably work! Is it a good use of your money though? The total amount of money I have spent on preparation resources is around 100 dollars. (Both volumes of HRK I bought at the start, and a copy of Purcell I bought after “previewing” the PDF.) I know IPhO gold medalists who have literally spent nothing. Contrast this with how tutors can be hundreds of dollars an hour, and courses can cost thousands. It’s clear that there isn’t any magic trick that paid resources teach you. Indeed, it’s a little mystifying why you don’t see more people who have spent these amounts of money at the highest level of the competition. (Paradoxically, spending more money seems to correlate with less intrinsic interest.) Success in physics olympiads only requires knowing the material and knowing how to approach the exam. There’s no reason at all why learning that needs to cost money.

So, the advantages of paid resources have to lie in their aspects besides their content. From talking to people who’ve used them, I gather that the primary benefit is in providing a structure that incentivizes you to learn. For example, homework assignments you have to do and fixed lectures you have to attend. This is fine and all, but I feel like many people focus too much on trying to build structures to make themselves learn, instead of trying to increase their intrinsic interest in the subject (and reducing any friction towards pursuing it.) Indeed, a lot of people seem to be surprised at the idea that you can change your intrinsic interest at all. I will talk more about this in a blog post later. For some more perspective I’ve archived a post from another US Physics Team member describing his experience with Tang Academy, one of the more prominent paid courses in this domain.

X resource is necessary

I think physics olympiad discussions tend to feed this misconception. If you go to PhODS right now there will be many people eager to tell you to use HRK, Kevin Zhou, Kalda, or whatever, with the implication that there’s some knowledge in there that you’ll flounder without. In reality, physics is physics. Different resources contain different pieces of it and present it in different ways, but there is only one thing you’re trying to learn. The reason there’s a canonical list of resources is because many people have found those resources to be especially comprehensive or clear, but there’s nothing stopping you from deviating from it. In fact, there’s a lot of upside in finding new resources that could improve upon the consensus, and just repeating “do knzhou” detracts from that. (That said, it is a very good resource.)

Spending an ungodly number of hours is required

Not really. Most IPhO people I talk to say they’ve spent something of the order of magnitude of 500 hours in total. I also doubt I averaged more than an hour of day of studying; from picking up HRK to flying to the international olympiad was a little under two years for me. A lot of people don’t really believe this, and envision spending all day hunkered in a room grinding. Let me try to dispel that notion.

First you might simply doubt how little hours it takes to reach the top. The truth is that the IPhO genuinely has very few concepts that are not in HRK (my favorite introductory physics textbook.) There are around 50 chapters in total. How many hours do you suppose it takes to deeply understand a single chapter? I have a hard time imagining it could be much more than ten; that’s five days of wrestling with the material for two hours daily. Indeed, it can be a lot less if the content fits into your head naturally, whether through prior exposure or being gifted⁴. If it takes a lot more than ten hours I think your understanding of the prerequisites is likely incomplete. In any case, fifty times ten gives us those 500 hours.

Second, if it only takes that much, what’s to stop you from just studying like crazy for a few months, taking the test and collecting your gold medal? Well, not all hours of study are equal. This will be obvious after you try to study for a few hours straight. The more you study the less effective it gets. You can ameliorate this by inserting breaks and being in good physical condition, but I doubt you can get much more than eight maximum-effectiveness-equivalent studying hours a day. I haven’t even touched upon how the average student’s hour of studying is 40 minutes of Instagram reels, 10 minutes of staring at the page, and 10 minutes of actual brain activity. Any drop in focus is an exponential fall in effectiveness. This is reason to be optimistic though; you likely could be much more efficient with your studying than you think.

If you don’t have math contest background you’re cooked

Why do you see so many former math olympiad people doing physics? Well, who’s the most likely to hear about physics olympiads? Probably people who already do math olympiads. In Physics competitions are easier than math I gave a number of reasons why physics appears to be easier than math, namely: having accumulated years of learning experience and a smaller syllabus. These advantages aren’t exclusive to doing math olympiads! In my opinion the most important advantage is likely learning experience; I’ll have more to say in the future about making the most of your learning.

Who your competition is

It is very hard to qualify for USAPhO

For anyone who’s likely to hear about the competition, I don’t think there’s any real obstacle at all to qualifying for the USAPhO. People can be better or worse at dealing with the quirks of its format, but I don’t think it’s anything impossible to overcome. Qualifying requires an actual understanding of mechanics, the ability to quickly apply it, and a little luck. Nothing else. (Obtaining those things can be nontrivial, yes.)

It is very easy to qualify for USAPhO

Some people seem to think that the F=ma exam isn’t very difficult at all, and that they can qualify just by having taken a mechanics class or maybe not even that. And yes, there are people who can qualify after sitting through some of AP Physics 1. (On the other hand, it is improbable to qualify with no physics experience and I don’t believe any of the cases I’ve heard.) But you shouldn’t assume that you’re one of those people! If you actually want to qualify for USAPhO as a serious goal, you need to do serious work. Maybe you have good intuition, maybe you have a speed issue. I know people who know tremendous amounts of physics but never qualified for USAPhO because they weren’t fast enough and didn’t want to spend their time grinding. The takeaway you should have is that the F=ma exam is not quite testing the same thing as an understanding of physics.

Getting X medal is easy

Many people seem to have miscalibrated expectations for how much work getting a medal on the USAPhO takes.

Getting honorable mention mostly requires being able to do a nonzero amount of the exam, something like solving 0.5-1 problems cumulatively. This is actually pretty hard to do if you were at the bare minimum to pass F=ma and then didn’t bother to study.

Getting bronze is a little tougher but similar, 1-2 problems. I think it’s a realistic goal for people in their first year of doing physics olympiads. (This does not imply higher medals are unrealistic!)

Getting silver requires being decently well prepared, i.e. studying some topic that isn’t mechanics. 2-3 problems. For most people, getting past this point requires using more advanced resources.

Before I explain gold I should explain how qualifying for camp works. Around 500 people take USAPhO and get their exams graded. The top ten automatically qualify for camp. Then, the next ten people who are NOT seniors or people who have previously qualified for camp are invited⁵. If people decline camp invitations, they get gold medals instead; camp selection then follows the rules again, but with that person removed from the ranking⁶.

Anyway, gold typically requires 3-4 problems, although in recent years scores in this range have been enough to qualify for camp. Why did I bother explaining the camp selection process? Well, one of its implications is that more seniors receive gold than if simply the T20 was selected. Thus, if you’re in a younger grade and your score falls somewhere in this cluster, your chance of getting gold is a little smaller. I don’t really see many people aim explicitly for gold; their goal was usually either silver or to qualify for camp. I think this is most likely because of the smaller gap between gold and camp, compared to other medal thresholds.

Qualifying for camp is impossible

Let me reproduce the paragraph from before:

Around 500 people take USAPhO and get their exams graded. The top ten automatically qualify for camp. Then, the next ten people who are NOT seniors or people who have previously qualified for camp are invited. If people decline camp invitations, they get gold medals instead; camp selection then follows the rules again, but with that person removed from the ranking.

It’s very possible to qualify; more than twenty people do it every year! (There are usually one or two people who decline.) But it’s definitely not a casual undertaking.

There definitely seems to be something different about qualifying for camp. In the end all you have to do is score slightly better on the USAPhO, but people treat it with more weight. Given the camp experience, I honestly think it does deserve that weight. After I started taking physics seriously, sometimes it felt ludicrous to imagine that I could possibly make it. Now, on the other side, here’s the advice I’d give to people who feel like how I did.

What exactly does it take? Historically, 4-4.5 problems if you’re not a senior or returning camper. Something like 5 if you are. Doing this is actually very difficult! Being able to score this high reliably requires mastery of the core curriculum, and the ability to extend it on the fly.

The most important thing is that camp is not mystical. The road is pretty well illuminated, even if not everyone who starts on it gets to the end. It will be long and effortful, but nothing extraordinary. If you know what it takes, all you have to do is to do it.

What if it goes wrong? Accidents happen, you’ll have your good and bad days, and you don’t know what the exam will be like until you take it. The unfortunate truth is that even if you do everything right, you might not still make it. In my opinion, this is actually one of the most important lessons olympiads can teach you. I could talk about all the physics you’ll learn in the process, the good habits you’ll form, the joy you’ll feel after figuring it out and the good times you’ll have with friends, but here’s what I think is fundamental: Success requires the possibility of failure. You can love it with all your heart and still not make it, despite not making it, and that’s what makes it worth doing⁷.

The people at IPhO are gods and you can never be like them

Some part of me believed this all the way up to being selected for the team and a good deal after as well. I can now report that godhood is quite dismal and involves a lot of scratch paper. I’ve befriended many IPhO contestants, and for the most part, they’re just like a bright and curious high school student who happens to know an extraordinary amount of physics for their age. They have fun with friends, waste time watching shorts, spend probably too much time playing video games, etc. I’ve encountered people who seem genuinely on another level to me, but if you asked them, they’d strenuously deny being some genius. True brilliance is very rare, and not even required; all you have to do is be the sort of person who has abnormal motivation to learn physics.

Musings from that voice in your head

You personally aren’t good enough to make it

It seems that for some reason, you’re most prone to feeling like this after hearing about someone younger than you who appears to be more advanced. It’s somehow worse if they’ve spent less time in total than you have. Surely they’re just better than you, and that means you’re too bad to succeed. My response: maybe they are better than you! They could have started earlier, had less dysfunctional time management, somehow imbibed physics intuition through another activity… Yes, they might even just be smarter than you. I then have two questions. First: what exactly can you do about it? No one comes into physics olympiads as a blank slate; there’s no way for you to change your background. What you do have the ability to change is the future. That leads me to my second question: why does any of this imply that you can’t succeed? You need to actually consider what it takes to reach your goals. How talented your competitors are does affect this, but that’s an variable that you can’t change nor know the real state of. People sometimes think “if this is who I’m competing with, then I have no chance.” I think at most skill levels, this is just wrong. First, you are probably competing against a few hundred people, and you have just heard about precisely one of them. Second, the reason you’re hearing about them is probably because they’re really good! You aren’t going to hear about all of the other students who aren’t so stellar. In any case, it’s not like you can actually change how skilled your competitors are; all you can do is focus on yourself. ⁸

With that said, how do you tell if you’re able to reach your goals or not? It might be true that you aren’t where you want to be right now, but what does that say about your potential improvement? I think that if you look back to a month ago, you’ll probably find that you’ve advanced quite a lot. Maybe the worry is that you won’t be good enough in time. Consider how much effort it’ll take for you to improve to a sufficient level, and evaluate if you can reasonably do it. You’ll be in the mood to answer “infinity” and “zero chance”; reject that impulse and actually think about it. Remember that quitting means you definitely won’t make it. I think anything from redoubling your efforts to dropping the enterprise entirely can be appropriate, you just need to do it because you actually considered your progress, and not because of your emotions.

You should drop everything else and just do physics

There seem to be two reasons people feel this.

The first you find in people who are desperate to succeed for one reason or another, and think it’s necessary to start cutting back on other commitments. Now, I think it’s perfectly fine if you stop watching so much Youtube or decide to quit that club you don’t actually like being in. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing your time. However, I think it’s a bad idea to cut back on your social life, stop exercising, avoid hobbies that bring you joy, etc. Physics olympiads will only be relevant for a few years at most, while you have your whole entire life ahead of you. Indeed, if you stop doing these things then often it starts to sap your ability to do physics as well.

The second you find in people who feel that physics is genuinely more enjoyable than most of the other things in their life. It’s unfortunate if that’s actually true for you, but in a lot of cases there isn’t much you can do to fix your life at that moment. What I’ll say is that you still need to consider your future beyond physics olympiads. However, being able to deeply focus on physics was very rewarding for me, and I don’t want anyone to deprive themselves of that experience if they have a choice.

If you aren’t able to succeed in this you can’t succeed in anything else

I see a lot of people who act like their entire life hinges on how well they’re going to do on a few-hours long exam. Well, it does! Your life will likely be different depending on whether you get gold or silver or whatever. But why do you ascribe “failure” to one possible outcome and “success” to the other? Think carefully about what actually could go wrong. Sure, maybe your school will be slightly less prestigious, and you won’t be able to pursue your dream career of investment banking or quantitative finance (lmao). Are you really going to let that setback turn your life into a failure? There’s also the issue of what it actually means to fail in life! In order to fail you need to have a goal in the first place. Have you ever thought about what you actually want to do with your life? An alarming number of students I see only have vague notions of “more money would be nice I guess”, “to make my parents happy”, “to look impressive to other people”. Of course, it’s not fair to expect high school students to know what to do with their life. But even if you don’t, there’s probably a general direction you want to head towards. Whatever it is, think about whether physics olympiads will really matter for it. Whether you succeed or not, physics olympiads will be part of your life. Maybe this chapter won’t end how you wanted. But it’s still possible for you to write the rest of your story.

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1. This is a bit of a nonanswer. If you’ve done olympiad math and then start doing olympiad physics, there’s a certain skill you need a lot in math that feels a little like “figuring it out”, and in physics this skill seems quite untested in comparison, so you might conclude physics is easier. My claim is that there is a separate skill in physics you need a lot of that is not the same as this skill. As of lately this skill also seems to be going untested at international olympiads, but hey, it was a real thing I swear. ↩

2. In math, there are an astonishing and wonderful variety of objects you can study and characterize. Likewise in physics, but now you have the constraint that these objects live in reality and have to follow some ultimate laws. Furthermore, everything in physics obey these laws, so the same principles show up over and over again. So the goal of introductory physics is to understand these principles deeply, through taking a tour of classical mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and relativity, as well as a little peek at quantum mechanics. You could imagine adding some new field of study like material science to the IPhO Syllabus, and asking participants to learn some more laws and concepts. My point is that this doesn’t really capture the spirit of physics. It’s far better to give people some scenario in material science, and even though they’ve never studied this specific field, they’re still able to understand it, because the same underlying principles are there. So this is my justification for why the syllabus is what it is, end of very long digression that i will turn into a footnote. ↩

3. Actually, I think olympiads are some of the few remaining ways of signaling extraordinary technical talent left in the US. They’re almost all that’s left for high school students, anyway. ↩

4. See You personally aren’t good enough to make it for more discussion. ↩

5. Why is it harder for seniors? Well, I can’t actually know what the coaches are thinking, but I do think it’s logical to try to encourage younger students who have a chance to return in later years. It does suck if you’re a senior though, sorry about that. ↩

6. To my knowledge rankings have never been published for USAPhO, and also are hidden from you at camp (well, you will know if you’re in the top five or not at the end.) ↩

7. Thanks to Evan Chen for this. ↩

8. In general, estimating the skill of your competitors is pretty useless beyond knowing what the typical cutoffs are. I wouldn’t worry over whether USAPhO takers are slightly more predisposed to be better at mechanics this year because of a difficult F=ma or whatever. In my opinion, PhODS tends to amplify silly stuff like this. ↩