Critics call NatPlus "academic hazing." Dr. Marcus Thorne, an education professor at Stanford, argues: "The 'Plus' is just trauma with a fancy name. We are teaching kids that self-destruction is a virtue. No problem set is worth a panic attack."
The infamous "Long Form." Students receive a 30-page booklet. The first 25 pages are source material: a fragment of a lost Greek play, a spreadsheet of epidemiological data from a fictional pandemic, a patent for a new type of battery, and a single photograph of an obscure 1927 political rally in Vienna. The last five pages contain four prompts. The catch: you cannot answer Prompt 4 without using information from Prompts 1–3, and the photograph from Vienna is a red herring (but no one knows which year they’ll remove it). natplus contest
On a rain-slicked Tuesday evening in a nondescript convention hall outside Chicago, three hundred teenagers sit in perfect silence. The only sounds are the scratch of pencils, the hum of industrial HVAC units, and the occasional, stifled sob. A timer on the wall ticks down from 180 minutes. Critics call NatPlus "academic hazing
One finalist from 2020 (who asked to remain anonymous) told me: "I trained for eighteen months. I solved over two thousand practice problems. Nothing prepared me for the moment they said, 'The square is now a triangle. You have ninety minutes.' I laughed. Then I cried. Then I solved it. Barely." Every enduring contest has its myth, and NatPlus has the Dark Packet . No problem set is worth a panic attack
By J. S. Moreau
Zhang has a point. In the past decade, NatPlus finalists have gone on to win eight Rhodes Scholarships, three MacArthur "Genius" Grants, and one Nobel Prize (Chemistry, 2025, Dr. Elena Okonkwo, who credits her NatPlus training for teaching her "how to hold two contradictory hypotheses in my head without panicking"). As of this writing, the 2026 NatPlus National Finals are two weeks away. The official website has posted a single, cryptic line: "This year, the answer is not a number. And you will not write it down."