Student Olympiad movement as a search tool and pedagogical work with gifted youth: principles, characteristics, experience

The paper deals with the principles of organization of the Olympiad student movement in the Russian Federation, the author describes the purpose of the student contests in higher educational institutions of the country. The considered problem is solved in the process of identifying gifted students and pedagogical work with talented youth. The author describes benefits of student participation in the Olympiad movement, both for students and for institutions of higher education. The paper contains advantages and disadvantages of conducting these activities. The emphasis is on the features of Russian student Olympiads in mathematics, namely in such a subject area as probability theory and mathematical statistics. The paper also contains experience accumulated by the Department of Mathematical Statistics and Econometrics for conducting the Russian student Olympiad on the basis of Samara State University of Economics. To train the Olympic team of the University a computer simulator developed by the teachers of the Department is used. This software which is a graphical multi-window interface allows teachers to interact with students. The computer program contains tasks of previous Russian student Olympiads of various levels.