As an educational institution providing Yau Science Awards Professional Training for teenager, we conduct research on the Yau Award-winning works every year.

In order to give everyone a more intuitive understanding of the judging style of economic and financial modeling of the 2024 Yau Science Awards, the topic selection preferences of each subject, and the elements of the winning works , we invited Mr. W, a gold medal economic tutor from Embark , to combine his experience in recent years. The analysis of the Yau Science Awards award-winning projects will be brought to you in lectures to share.

Considering that some parents and classmates may have missed this sharing, we have summarized the essence of the lecture into a document, come and study together!

The Value of the Yau Science Awards Economic Track

The Yau Science Award for Middle School Students is a scientific innovation award for middle school students initiated by the mathematics master Mr. Shing-tung Yau in 2008. It takes "scientific research academic papers" and "professional academic defense" as the evaluation subjects, and participates in the form of submitted papers.

In 2013, the Yau Science Awards was officially renamed the " Yau Science Awards" and has gradually developed from a single mathematics subject to a top scientific research competition covering six major disciplines. In 2022, it was selected into the competition whitelist of the Ministry of Education of China, which shows its influence.

Many parents and students who are accustomed to the domestic test-taking model will ask us "what is the test for the Yau Science Awards?" Let us take a look at what the Yau Science Awards really wants to examine from the official judging criteria :

The Yau Science Awards has been extremely influential and recognized internationally since its inception. There are many top high schools at home and abroad participating in the competition, and they are unanimously favored by admissions officers from domestic and foreign universities .

According to statistics from the Yau Science Awards Organizing Committee, more than half of the award-winning young students have gone on to study at well-known Chinese and foreign universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Princeton . Embark offers Yau Science Award training courses. Under the leadership of instructors, our trainees stand out in the Yau Science Awards and successfully get offers from Ideal University. Many of them are scientific research talents who continue to pursue academic research after entering Ideal University.

2023 Yau Science Awards Economic Awards Analysis

In 2023, the Yau Science Award attracted a total of more than 2,000 teams to sign up, and a total of 92 teams participated in the global finals , 75 teams from the Chinese competition area, 12 teams from the Asian competition area, and 5 teams from the North American competition area.

The research scope of the economic and financial modeling discipline covers all fields of economics (including finance). This year ’s progress in the semi-finals of this track is as follows:

semifinal situation

Beijing: 7 projects

Shaanxi Province: 1 project

Guangdong Province: 5 projects

Shanghai: 4 projects

Jiangsu Province: 1 project

Zhejiang Province: 1 project

Chongqing City: 2 projects

Without exception, these projects have a complete and substantial research process , with an average number of pages of about 31 pages, an average of 25 pages of text, and an average paper workload of about 13.07 hours.

Looking at the final projects in 2022-23, most of them are econometrics that are closer to real-life topics . The specific distribution is as follows:

What is the unique charm of these econometric projects? Next, let us take a closer look at the economic and financial track by interpreting the grand prize works of the 2023 Yau Science Awards !

Interpretation of 2023 Yau Science Awards economic award-winning works

School: Beijing No.11 School

Participating student: Wu Ruishan

Topic: Analysis of the free-rider problem from different perspectives based on game models

This project vividly uses the game theory model to analyze the common "free-riding" phenomenon in life, analyzes this common problem in daily cooperation in simple and easy-to-understand terms , and proposes methods to improve the "free-riding effect" to better develop reality. Teamwork provides a reference.

Compared with other works on the economic track, this project uses game theory to analyze the essence of the problem through simplicity and straightforwardness, showing the author's proficiency in using models. This is the highlight of the project.

Among the works that have won the highest awards in recent years,  there are many excellent works that use game theory and problem-driven methods. For example, the 2021 Gold Award work used game theory methods to explore carbon emission tax strategies, and the 2022 Gold Award work used game theory to explore financial market investment strategies and the flow of "Smart money".

Therefore, we believe that the idea of using game theory to analyze daily problems in this article is very consistent with the works that have won the highest award in the past two years, and is worthy of learning and reference by future participating students. Middle school students can discover problems in life, associate them with relevant economics or mathematical methods, and find out the essence of the problem and solutions through modeling analysis.

The Role of Scientific Research in College Admissions

The latest situation of early application can be described as tragic. In the fierce competition, if you want to show your personal characteristics and academic background to the admissions officers and rush to your dream school, scientific research is the only choice .

The Stanford admissions officer describes his admissions tendencies this way: " Students who have a strong passion for a certain field and have made certain achievements in this field will be listed at the top of the admissions list."

For a subject with a relatively high degree of economics, having an in-depth scientific research experience is definitely a "plus point" for students who want to go in this direction.

Allowing children who are interested in scientific research to conduct "down-to-earth" and valuable research is also the goal that Embark has been striving for. Compared with subject-based competitions, scientific research requires a longer cycle. If you want to tap your academic potential through scientific research projects and learn about Yau Science Awards Tailored Training Programs, come and contact us.