Welcome to the most relentless, beautiful, and brutal academic contest you have never heard of. The NatPlus Contest was founded in 2008 by Dr. Helena Voss, a cognitive psychologist and former International Math Olympiad gold medalist. Her frustration was simple: existing contests, she argued, measured retrieval speed and narrow expertise. They rewarded the student who had memorized the most, not the one who could think the deepest.
For the uninitiated, the NatPlus Contest sounds like just another high school competition: a multidisciplinary exam promising scholarships, prestige, and a line on a college resume. But ask anyone who has made it to the National Finals, and they will tell you a different story. They will tell you about the maze. They will tell you about the "Dark Packet." They will tell you about the year the answer key was a lie. natplus contest
"Standardized exams are rearview mirrors," Voss famously said in her manifesto, The Plus Condition . "They tell you where a student has been. NatPlus is a headlight. It shows you where they could go." Welcome to the most relentless, beautiful, and brutal
In 2015, a printing error occurred. The Day Two booklets for Section B (seats 112–145) contained a completely different set of problems—problems that, by all accounts, were impossible. One question allegedly asked: "Prove or disprove the existence of a finite number that is its own successor, using only the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and a haiku about entropy." Her frustration was simple: existing contests, she argued,