How to Select the Best Team
Canada's Experience
In 4 years of participation, Team Canada has managed to win 20 medals, 12 of which are gold. Since the very first start, Canadian contestants showed remarkable individual results and great teamwork. We asked Yuri Khoroshilov, IEO National Coordinator for Canada, to share his experience on selecting such strong national delegates and training his team. Watch the full interview or read the summary below.
Yuri Khoroshilov
IEO National Coordinator, Canada
Economics education in Canada
The Canadian Economics Olympiad appeared in 2020 when Andy Wei, a student from Toronto, approached Yuri and asked him to help organize the national selection: they only had one month before the application deadline but managed to hold the rounds successfully and apply on time.
In Canada, economics is not on the regular curriculum — it is studied properly as a separate course only at IB programs. The government does not support intellectual contests and has no programs for talented youth: all selections for international olympiads are organized by non-governmental organizations. There is no centralized Ministry of Education, each province has its own governing body in the field of education with its own rules and programs which makes nationwide promotion of the educational initiatives via governmental sources practically impossible. However, none of this has ever prevented Canada from being represented by extremely well-prepared young economists.
In Canada, economics is not on the regular curriculum — it is studied properly as a separate course only at IB programs. The government does not support intellectual contests and has no programs for talented youth: all selections for international olympiads are organized by non-governmental organizations. There is no centralized Ministry of Education, each province has its own governing body in the field of education with its own rules and programs which makes nationwide promotion of the educational initiatives via governmental sources practically impossible. However, none of this has ever prevented Canada from being represented by extremely well-prepared young economists.
“
The key is students’ own motivation. The majority of hard-working Canadian students want to go to U.S. universities for further studies, and for them, everything matters: advanced placement exams, extracurricular activities, victory at the IEO. Those students study economics on their own, prepare and learn by themselves or go to private schools, preparatory classes, advanced placement economics exams, some have even already took them
Selection structure
The CEO is a two-stage competition. The first round is held online in the format of a multiple-choice test without invigilation — Yuri does not believe in monitoring students to avoid cheating:
“
In Canada, we trust students. If you ask them not to cheat, they're not going to cheat. We don't need to actually proctor that heavily. If we would have some suspicion, maybe we would have made an interview, but so far, I mean, all of the results at CEO were kind of backed up by their coursework: all of our students either do international baccalaureate in economics or already took and got a grade «5» on AP economics exam.
The second round is moving to the in-person format next year. It contains open questions. Both rounds focus on microeconomics, macroeconomics and finance. Yuri believes that the tasks of the CEO are even harder than those of the IEO since they contain lots of game theory.
“
We do not include business but we do have, two years in a row now, a separate business case competition. It is just because the IEO has this business case part, and it is actually similar to the format the IEO holds it in. Our national team is composed of 4 winners of CEO and 1 winner of this business case competition — this way we always have somebody who knows how to run business case.
Questions
According to Yuri, the hardest part of a national selection organization is to come up with good questions. There is a board of Jury composed of economics professors, students and CEO alumni who come up with different questions which they then grade. This helps to maintain variety and distribute resources properly. As to the contents of the tasks, Yuri thinks that game theory is the best topic for the selection.
“
I believe a lot in game theory. In the second part of the Olympiad, we always have game theoretical questions, but not the simple kind of them: it's more of signaling self-selection kind of questions. Sometimes we pick really computational questions or classical papers on it (e.g. signaling in education or self-selection in lemon car markets and multi-part questions asking about the outcomes of various situations). I also like the intuition kind of game theory equation. For example, my favorite task of the CEO is to define what a reputation is. Students who actually understand economics say reputation is probability based on public information of you to be in a certain type and building reputation means making an action to change the probability of those perceived beliefs in some way. It is also good that ChatGPT (at least the 3.5 version of it) cannot come with this kind of deep answer.
The CEO stands out for the hardness of its questions. It is impossible to reach the maximum: the best contestant, according to the ranking, gained 71%, and the border point for winners in general is 60%. Yuri believes that it helps keep the contest challenging enough for the participants.
“
We tell our students: don't expect to get everything. Don't be discouraged if you cannot answer half of the questions. That's normal. That's what the test is designed to look like.
Contestants’ portfolio and training
With the intense competition at the IEO, it is important to pay attention to the finalists’ portfolio in order to detect potential lack of knowledge in a particular field of economics and help to fill it with training. Yuri pays attention to different achievements, e.g. AP exams, victories at business case contests and other competitions to check the correlation between their academic success and the results of the CEO. For preparation, the team has a Discord channel where the organizers share materials and the contestants go through all kinds of papers and ask questions: this way, students study at their own pace. Yuri also invites CEO and IEO alumni help with the preparation.
“
In terms of business case, one of our secret weapons is a Brazilian team member, Guilherme Pita, who is now finishing the University of Toronto. He is our permanent coach for the business case. Because of him, we did so well from the beginning. He runs a few training exercises for business case.
Tips for IEO participants
To reach the best results at the IEO and actually enjoy it, Yuri recommends the following:
For students:
The issue at the Economics round is to carefully read the question. Advanced Placement Micro and Microeconomics is kind of a must. It is also very important to understand what the authors of the questions meant. You need to know the first couple of terms of micro and macro at university level, at least the first term. You also need to learn a little bit of game theory, finance, time, value of money on your own. It's all about knowledge and ability to understand the situation.
The issue at the Economics round is to carefully read the question. Advanced Placement Micro and Microeconomics is kind of a must. It is also very important to understand what the authors of the questions meant. You need to know the first couple of terms of micro and macro at university level, at least the first term. You also need to learn a little bit of game theory, finance, time, value of money on your own. It's all about knowledge and ability to understand the situation.
For team leaders:
Fight for your students. Any team leader's goal is not to bring students to the contest but to get good results so you need to fight for every point, and 20 minutes might be not enough.
Fight for your students. Any team leader's goal is not to bring students to the contest but to get good results so you need to fight for every point, and 20 minutes might be not enough.
For national organizers:
Believe in students. Consider them as your equals and trust them. They want to do their best. Be very flexible — don't do something your way just because it’s a tradition: if somebody asks you to change something, listen to them and change it, if that is a better thing to do. If existing rules need to be abandoned, abandon them. Try to accommodate anybody who comes to you. Also, do the national selection only if you want to do it — don't make it your job, make it your hobby since you will likely never get money for this job. Also, never pay money to anybody unless you have lots of money: always find volunteers, invite your alumni to help — they always like to be part of the event.
Believe in students. Consider them as your equals and trust them. They want to do their best. Be very flexible — don't do something your way just because it’s a tradition: if somebody asks you to change something, listen to them and change it, if that is a better thing to do. If existing rules need to be abandoned, abandon them. Try to accommodate anybody who comes to you. Also, do the national selection only if you want to do it — don't make it your job, make it your hobby since you will likely never get money for this job. Also, never pay money to anybody unless you have lots of money: always find volunteers, invite your alumni to help — they always like to be part of the event.
Read more
See our Experience Exchange materials to learn about other countries' tips on organizing the National Selection
Head of Economics at Rochester Independant College about the creation and development of the British Economics Olympiad
IEO National Coordinator for Japan on the best practices of Japanese Financial Literacy Tournament
IEO EB member and Team Latvia coordinator on the development strategy for well-established contests
Singapore Economics Olympiad creator on how networking helped him to launch the national selection from scratch
OBECON co-founder and venture capital analyst on sponsorship and fundraising for educational projects
Tilda Publishing
Join us!
Anna Bondareva
ab@ecolymp.org
Contact our Partner Manager to get a personal consultation on joining the IEO or reach out to share your experience.