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(1)The students who are good at math helped him solve the problems.
(2)The students who were good at math helped him solve the problems.
Let's say this happened 2 days ago. The students mentioned in the sentence are still good at math, so I think (1) is more accurate. Am I right? And (2) is the narrative tense, used only in story telling, right?
Technically both are correct, but when using this to talk explain to others what happened, saying "The students who were good at math helped him solve the problems." makes it seem like you either fell out of touch with those students, or they're dead.
I would personally always use the first sentence in this situation to avoid that potential confusion, but both are technically correct I believe.
Both sentences are fine and a native English listener wouldn't find either to be odd in any way.
The problem you're seeing is that the tense of the attributive verb can imply things like the fact that the students who helped may not be good at math anymore.
If it is important to eliminate the implication, you can insert a clause that does this:
The students who were good at math (and continue to be) helped him solve the problems.
This can get unwieldy, though, so unless an implication is significant and likely to be intuited, it's better to just allow them to sit.
