Junior maths challenge 2025

All the top private schools - girls or boys - do discretionary entries and the pressure from parents is no less in these schools, so that cant be a differentiating factor. The outreach seems to have paid off as @Combinatoric says - even from the comments here, it is evident that there are so many DDs entering and doing well here.

The discretionary entries TOTALLY happens...parental pressure is through the roof. I find it really weird that they don't celebrate successes even internally though. Maybe they don't want to create jealousies in an ambitious parent/student body which is not unheard of.
Maths is having its moment and a decade of outreach, especially for girls, seems to have paid off. The MOG has been cut right back this year to 2 free entries per school and a max of 2 discretionary entries. This is going to be a massive headache for those top private girls' schools...how to dish them out without causing an uproar!

I did know that the top girls school doesn't appear to publicise their results but didnt know about the discretionary entries if that happens.

If they do indeed go down this route then it feels a "bit suss" to me. Imo they should just be open and honest about the whole process, good or bad.

Otherwise what a school could do is prepare specifically for the JMO, and not the JMC, knowing that whatever JMC mark their pupils achieve they are in the JMO anyway.

Just found out my DD11 got a lowish merit close to the average. As I've said before I am more than happy with that. I'll take it all day long. I think a certificate of qualification may have made her question if she really belongs at Olympiad level.

When I saw the markers report the other day and the apparent strictness in the marking I did start to wonder where she would land but fortunately it's turned out all good.

More the anything I think going forward the experience will benefit her, and she'll now know if she wants to do better next year (assuming she qualifies) she actually has to be more diligent and thorough in her preparation which she certainly wasn't this time around.

I'd love to know where this info about a girls' school winning the most medals comes from. I do know that the top girls' school is big on discretionary Olympiad entries as result from heavy parental pressure. Interestingly, the same school never broadcasts any UKMT successes on social media or in its newsletter, even at EGMO level, so it's hard to garner info from an internet scrape.
I wouldn't expect a correlation between discretionary entries & medals but it's not unheard of for some kids to perform better in the Olympiad-style questions over those in the Challenges.

Alternatively, the boys schools might have had a "bad" year. This year's paper was rather different from previous years and the marking scheme was, arguably, stricter than in previous junior competitions. Schools where a lot of children prepared for the JMO, e.g., WUS and SPS, might have been relatively disadvantaged if they prepared for previous years' standards.

If it is true that a girls school got the most medals this year, the question is whether they got many more than in previous years or that the "usual suspects" boys schools got many less?

I would not be surprised if this year lots (majority?) of medalist just solved the first four problems. While not to lose a couple of marks per question solved, you want to carefully describe the solutions leaving no logical gaps. My personal observations (but might be wrong here) - girls are more careful in general than boys :) Hence I can see this scenario as possible. At least in our case - DD with a medal, four problems carefully crafted while not much credit received for the last two problems. Though she is definitely not “a part of the scenario” as she yet to join the secondary school. Exciting times ahead

When I see the past achievements of places like WUS and St Pauls boys I'd be surprised if this was true.

However, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

Curious which girls school could it be? Only SPGS comes to mind

Also I heard that a Girls School won the most amount of medals at JMO this year - this is a first for any of the Olympiads and bodes well for attracting girls in this and following batches.

My DD got a Silver in JMO, missed Gold by a mark. Hopefully will keep her motivated for the higher maths challenges

My DD finally got her kangaroo results today - a high silver! I’m so pleased for her

The markers report is out.

Given the thresholds I did wonder yesterday if the average would be 25 or 26, in fact it's 25.5. The distribution isnt necessarily what I'd expect though, it looks quite "normal" with a very small upper tail. The "sweet spot" is 26-30.

The profile lacks smoothness, especially at the high frequency 22 threshold and low frequency 33. I guess they checked/ remarked a fair few close to these to maintain the integrity of the 65%/ 25% bands. Looks like a similar thing happens around the bronze threshold too.

It wont let me post the link but its on the site.

The school receives the itemization of the scores. They also receive a userid and password which can be used to log into the UKMT website and download the scans of the child's script. The schools is supposed to share these with the child.

Wonderful news, what a great result for a DS9.

I find the teacher comments funny. Imo your DS is better at maths than they are.

How did you know the itemisation of marks? Was the script handed back?

Headteacher just emailed us, DS9 got 33 and a Distinction. Almost full marks on the first three questions but hardly anything on the second half, even though he got the answers correct (but didn’t show working/proof).

Pleased for him esp as some school teachers have previously said he isn’t as good at maths as we think he is (my wife and I are terrible at maths so can’t accurately gauge his ability). This feels like a good benchmark, especially as he’s still in Y5.

@user149799568 yes apologies, I was incorrectly on the grade boundary being lower for a merit. Apologies.

The boundary for Merit is indeed 22, but that's the highest it has ever been, not lower than in previous years. And that's without Section A, so 22/60 this year where the previous high boundary was 21/70, which should map into something like 15 on Section B alone. So the top 65% of participants made good progress on three problems this year whereas the previous high was two Section B problems.

I'm afraid that I don't understand your argument.

@user149799568 the boundary for a merit was 22 which is a lot lower than previous years. That suggests that it was harder to get the first 30 Mark's than previous years, hence the lower merit boundary. Section A was probably easier to gain marks on but also suggests that questions 1-3 can't have been so easy compared to previous years.

Questions 5 & 6 are two of the more challenging they've asked recently. 2022 was the last time they had two such questions on the same paper. But they are both excellent examples of the problem solving that the JMO is about. Neither requires much mathematical knowledge but both require you to really put a few basic facts together in innovative ways. I believe that the two questions require very different approaches and, possibly, very different strengths. The "second part" of Question 5, showing that no odd values are possible, requires a particular insight which few will have seen. Question 6 is more straightforward, requiring structured thinking to see beyond the obvious, yet incorrect, answer. I wonder how many children who had the insight to complete Question 5 were also able to cover all the cases systematically in Question 6, and vice-versa? I hope that the markers report tells us how many children managed all six questions at 10-.

UKMT clearly intended to make Question 1 approachable by the vast majority of participants, but they ended up also making Questions 2 & 3 easier than usual, leading to the narrow range of boundaries between Distinction and Gold (9 points this year when it was usually more like 20 points on Part B).

Small differences between olympiad boundaries likely mean that about two questions (last two?) were particularly difficult. Extra time due to dropped section A was not enough to tackle some of these challenging questions

Thank you. Like I've said before I just hope my DD has Merit is in the bag and honestly I'd be more than fine with that. She's a confident kid and tried to predict about where she'd land and I think it'd be a big knock to her confidence if she didn't make Merit. That's really what I'm most worried about.

My DD is in the last chance saloon next yr and the way the thresholds have risen she's probably more likely to not qualify than qualify.

Your DD still has another 2 chances at qualification in the future so surely she must be a very strong candidate for one of the higher JMO bands.

@Jonny234 good luck to your DD. Very tight grade boundaries indeed but that means it wouldn't take so much of a jump to get from a merit to a Gold, which is nice to know as that level of progress is very do-able for future years. But also frustrating to be just the wrong side of a boundary!

That's a fantastic achievement for a year 6 daughter, must be top 10 in the country for a girl in that yeargroup, maybe even better. It's shame the way the narrow bands work how close she is to the higher thresholds yet not quite there. I do wonder if my DD may be at a similar level, i.e. the top third or quarter of Merit's, somewhere around 35% overall but it's still called a Merit.

I've contacted my DD's teacher but he hasn't replied yet.

I found out my Year 6 daughter got a merit in the olympiad with 30. She is a slow worker (has extra time) and only managed 3 questions fully, but almost full marks on each of these questions and a couple marks on the remaining two she barely had any time for. It is the first time she has done the olympiad so this is very encouraging for next year, as we now now she needs to just practise being more concise with her answers.