cahn

What you've said is basically what I'd gathered from my own sources. These days I no longer really have any emotional investment in the competitions (though I'm still amused by your describing it as a "fandom"), but it sounds miserable from a parent perspective.

It's not very equitable, but then everything about academic competitions has been getting less equitable since when I was a kid, so what else is new?

Mood. Though in my day it wasn't amazingly equitable, it just was inequitable among different axes that were probably less correlated with privilege. And some of these inequities have come from Pareto improvements (programs are around that didn't used to be), but the zero-sum aspects of competition means that it's necessarily worse for some people in some ways.

Running the MAA competitions is a tough job which I would hate to have. While it's never been done perfectly and I have been involved with them long enough both to have a long list of (mostly minor) complaints, I have a lot of respect for the staff for doing their best while being paid non-profit wages and having to put up with a lot of disrespect from students and parents. I mostly have experience from the era when they were operating out of Lincoln, Nebraska; around 2015 the Director of Competitions, who was a UNL professor, retired and the MAA decided to move the competitions division to its main headquarters in DC, which led to near-complete staff turnover and loss of institutional memory. My impression is that things have just been going downhill from there, particularly recently, with the DC office having trouble retaining staff. Hopefully the newly hired exective director of the MAA will be able to effect some positive changes, but she has a tough job!