Junior maths challenge 2025

Thanks for this. Interesting to see some actual figures surrounding boy:girl ratio in US/international competitions. Would be very interesting to see the actual split in UK competitions and number of high scoring girls getting medals etc.
Boys (and potentially Co-Ed too) schools from what I can see seem to promote and prepare students far more for Maths Competitions. It’s very frustrating if you have a DD that is good at Maths! Don’t think the reduction of places to enter MOG is going to be very helpful for girl’s opportunities to take part in Olympiad competitions. For those girls at selective or high performing girls’ schools there will definitely be far more than 4 students that would benefit from the opportunity and will now miss out. Very few would get into BMO via Senior Maths Challenge. Although I do appreciate it requires a lot of volunteers to mark these papers.

Thanks for that. I wrote to UKMT the other day asking for granularity on the Y7/ Y8 split knowing there are the odd younger kids too. They didnt disclose but just reconfirmed about 1,200 qualified for the Olympiad.

What you write is helpful and I'm surprised that the demarcation level is so wide. The only thing I would say is it possible that at younger ages that this may diminish. But contradicting that is an observation I initially overlooked..... anecdotally looking around there is a big ratio of boy to girl Olympiad qualifiers on Social media.

With my prudent hat on, assuming the Olympiads are 1,200 and making the assumptions at say it's 1/3's girls who qualify and there are more Y8's than Y7's who qualify, I feel safe saying my Yr7 DD has finished in the top 200 Yr7 girls who took the test. On that basis I'm very proud of her.

Stretching it to 80/20 and say 1/3 yr7, 2/3's Yr8 would be top 80. But that maybe feels like a stretch.

I am not aware that UKMT have published data on this topic, but their US counterparts used to. Of the top 5000 or so scores on the AMC12, the first round competition for 16-18 year olds in the US, typically about 80% belonged to boys. The US has a population five times that of the UK. I am extrapolating that a selectivity level of top 5000 in the US corresponds to one of top 1000 in the UK.

As for higher levels, Wikipedia claims that, in the International Mathematical Olympiad, "During the period 2000–2021, there were only 1,102 female contestants (9.2%) out of a total of 11,950 contestants. The gap is even more significant in terms of IMO gold medallists; from 1959 to 2021, there were 43 female (3.3%) and 1295 male gold medal winners."

Can I just ask what leads you to believe a 80:20 ratio?

I have nothing to go off myself, but like I said yesterday I didn't think about it until a poster on here mentioned it, and looking around social media there is definitely a boy bias at Olympiad.

Aside - Thanks for the info on MOG.

From the Senior Mathematical Challenge, about 1000 children qualify for the British Mathematical Olympiad Round 1. Of these, very likely more than 800 are boys and fewer than 200 are girls. The Mathematical Olympiad for Girls was created so that more girls would have the opportunity to experience Olympiad-style questions, which are very different from Challenge-style questions.

There are five questions on the MOG, of which only three require full Olympiad-style solutions rather than all six on the BMO1. Unlike the BMO1, questions on the MOG are broken up into parts which are intended to lead a girl towards a good solution. Like the BMO1, the MOG is nominally geared towards sixth formers but the level of the questions is lower than the BMO1, probably more like the first three questions of the Maclaurin (Year 11) Olympiad.

The problem is that, with each school being allowed four free entries to the MOG and an unlimited number of discretionary entries, there were too many papers to mark. According to the 2024 Markers Report, 4749 papers were returned in the MOG this year, vs ~1000 in the BMO1. From next year, each school will be allowed only two free entries and restricted to no more than two discretionary entries.

At the selectivity level of the Olympiads, i.e., top 0.5% of participants or so, the boy:girl ratio in math tends to be about 80:20. It skews even more towards boys as it gets more selective.

No idea but I've looked at social media and the split does seem boy heavy now I come to think of it.

DD got a bronze - year 7 at a local comp where they were not prepared in any way so I’m pretty impressed!

Well done to all the DS and DD for their JMC results and to those who have got into the follow on rounds. Does anyone know roughly the percentage of boys vs girls taking part in the Junior Mathematical Olympiad? Seems from social media to be mostly boys but I can see a few girls here on Mumsnet who have qualified so just wondered what the split is? Thanks.

DS (Year 7) came home today with a silver certificate, really pleased for him. He is at a non selective state and his Sparks leader board shows he is ranked 56 out of 120 in his year group.

I agree, I stand corrected. KS3 is too high and as it includes yr9 work would not apply for the age range.

I've had a look briefly at some Olympiad papers and algebra is very handy. If you can conceptualise how to apply it can be an easy way to pick up marks.

Made a note of your comments regarding prime factor trees, I cant remember them but my DD says she's done them in the past. We'll look at them pre exam, thanks.

I made comments last wk about maybe having a super kangaroo level. After looking at the IMC they in fact have grey and pink kangaroo levels. Imo they need to implement that for the JMC. It's a big leap from 100 to 124.

Not to disagree at on this friendly thread but you definitely don't need all KS3 topics for JMC.
There's no Pythagoras (that's only on IMC) and certainly no trigonometry. It is helpful to know things like polygons but good mathematicians can usually work them out from scratch using exterior angle arguments rather than tiresome formulas you learn for GCSE. Triangles too.
Also helpful to understand powers, but you rarely see roots.
You can see from the number of y5 and y6 pupils successfully taking the exam it's not about topic knowledge but about deeper understanding. You really don't need much algebra either although it can be helpful towards end of Kangaroo.
In fact all the questions are designed to be 'figure out able' if you can think clearly from solid KS2 knowledge
If there is one thing I would teach all JMC entrants it would be prime factor trees as it's a fantastically accessible tool useful for many JMC problems (which tend to have a number theory leanings). My son finally just encountered these in school (second term y7) but no mention yet of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic...yet

Great results. I think you might need to appreciate what is being tested. GCSE and A level is higher level maths theory and is not tested....as such. What the junior challenge seems to be doing is testing students ability to apply knowledge up to about the end of KS3 at an advanced level.

My daughter received gold certificate last year in JMC and went on to do Kangaroo but she only got a merit for Kangaroo. She is in year 7 now and this year she got full mark. She has told me that it is much easier this year. I personally don't like some of the questions. They are very different than the maths knowledge required for GCSE or A level exam.

I was new to the game so have been doing some sums.

Apparently 1.3m ish kids across yrs 7 and 8 in the UK. 300k+ take the test. Looking at social media feeds of schools a lot of those taking the test are just set 1, maybe sets 1+2 in schools. So from the off the competition is higher than the national average.

To get Kangaroo, top 10k is an achievement to be proud of. Well done.

My son in y5 got kangaroo, he is in ofsted good state school. In year 4 he got silver. He did some old papers at home.

Well a math-loving (stem degree) but rusty adult here and JMC is good fun, but I still couldn't answer a couple of Q's without a proper think, so certainly not within the time.
My DS got exact same score in Kangaroo as JMC last year. He made less silly mistakes early on but the last 5-7 Q's of Kangaroo are harder than JMC.
To put another way I'd say there's at least a 15 question overlap in difficulty level so don't be put off the Kangaroo, it's not so different than JMC.
Some of the later questions might be best solved with algebra but many can be figured out without it. In fact the UKMT solutions love their overly complicated algebraic solutions a bit too much IMHO, sometimes there's a much more elegant visual or symmetry based solution.
Good luck!

google kangeroo maths challenge.

My DD is through again too, We had a look at these when she went through in y6. (she's now in year 8)

But to be honest you can't really prep that much.... the questions are hard... if you have a "mathsy-brain" you can probably do some of them. (and the fact that they are through shows they have that mathsy-brain)....... but they are really challenging and prepping isnt really going to help.

Many, perhaps its fair to say that most, adults would score 0..... meanwhile some 10 year olds can answer some questions because their brains are wired like that.

DD was best in school at JMC in year 6 and was almost blown away by how hard kangeroo was.... but she still got some points.

That's a great score with no prep!

You can see lots of past papers - solutions to the Junior Kangaroo here (toggle the filter to that paper choice). If your time is limited, concentrate on the last 10 harder questions in each paper.
https://ukmt.org.uk/competition-papers/jsf/jet-engine:free-past-papers/tax/challenge-type:68/

I would also recommend you review 'Solutions and Investigations' to the JMC 2025 paper just sat as that gives some insight into the thinking of the question setters and some neater approaches which may become useful in the Kangaroo

That's great :)

We got the result today. It was the first time for DS (Y7) and he got 107. We were told it was the best of Y7/8 at his the school ( average public school). We are happy with his result, he had little practise and we didnt know about the challenage until quite late. He loved Math and numbers throughout primary but we never pushed anything. He got 120 in Sats math last year. He is now invited to take part in n3xt challenge in June.

Does anyone have good reccomendations for links or workbook so that we could prepare for the competition?

Still no results 🤷‍♀️ anyone else

Wow that is great - well done. Ours also state primary. Not sure what they’re playing at though as still no results given out! Will have to put it out of our minds til next week now