Junior maths challenge 2025

[scisso]

Does anyone know when the results and boundaries get announced? How was this year’s paper in comparison to previous years?

DD sat it and thought some of them were quite hard so had to guess them, but she hasn’t done much of the past papers so doesn’t have much to compare against.

any insights would be very much appreciated.

UKMT said online they had sent out all Kangeroo results @Jonny234 so I don’t think they hold them back.

My DD was delighted with her silver kangeroo score

(not sure of her score, she was only told silver, I'll ask her teacher tomorrow)

She was only 1 question off olympiad, and after discussing maths challenge with her y7 sibling on the day of the test, she realised she had lost one of the "easier" questions..... If she'd have got that easy one she would have been in olympiad

I think the JK questions are definitely still 'a little' harder (based on my own kid doing past papers in both) but in fact you raise an interesting point because a few years ago you absolutely needed to use algebra for last few of JK but definitely less so now.
Maybe this is inline with your comment that 23-25 on JMC are also more accessible recently which I would also agree with.

Whilst I don’t think UKMT hold back the Kangaroo results, the school may choose to wait until the Olympiad results are returned so they can give out all results to pupils at the same time. I am certainly aware of this happening.

Well done to your DD

I asked the original question because my DD's teacher claimed today that the kangaroo results hadn't come back yet. Seemed a bit weird????

I was trying to figure out why not?

I don’t think UKMT would hold back the Kangaroo results. It will be an overhead for them to go back and sort both again.

My son’s school didn’t give the Kangaroo results yet. Probably they might be waiting for the JMO results to come through and then share all at once.

We are waiting for JMO results too.

Hopefully the JMO results might be on their way soon. This message has now appeared on UKMT X account in response to a question as to whether the JMO has been marked:
The papers have been marked and the results are being prepared and finalised. Schools will be notified as soon as the results are available on their account. Team UKMT.

DC said that the school gave out Kangaroo certificates today. Others at the school did take the JMO.

user149799568 Thanks for that.

Since I started learning about all this I've looked around a fair bit. Thinking back to another post, I believe of yours showing over representation of boys at this level....thank you. It didnt feel real at first and I wonder how that mapped to the JMO rather than the senior example you gave.

I started by thinking ok it's maybe 60%-70% boys who are Olympiads but I think I'm way off with that. Looking around it must be 4:1, 5:1, 6:1 ratio type of thing, there are so many in comparison to girls and at some top schools like WUS and St Pauls there are dozens of them every year. No mixed or girls school seem to come close.

Then there is the year split, again it looks similar ratio's as above for Yr8 vs the other years is far more prevalent.

So I'm starting to think, and although I'll probably never know the answer that I'm pretty sure my Yr7 DD's achievement is very rare. Very proud of her even before I know the JMO result.

My son’s school gave out the Kangaroo results yesterday.

JMO results should be out soon hopefully before the school closes. Otherwise have to wait until September.

Congratulations to your daughter @Jonny234 on getting into the JMO, that is a great achievement.
I have also been interested in the gender split and would love to see the actual data.
From looking online boys schools often seem to have clubs where they are practicing for maths challenges. Competition is encouraged and expectations are high which will boost numbers of awards year on year. St Paul’s Girls had posted that they had 14 girls get through to the Intermediate Olympiad one year - that is likely to be one of the highest number of female entrants in the country - but about half the number of those from top performing boys schools qualifying for the Junior Maths Olympiad - although maybe more girls would qualify from SPGS for JMO? (No information about that seems to be posted).
I just don’t think, sadly, despite there clearly being able female maths students that maths is promoted as much for girls in schools or celebrated in the same way. This may mean actually that achievements of girls are slightly under-reported. It is very difficult to know without actual data being available.

Nightingale987

I agree with everything you say. It does look like top boys school have practice clubs, and also the aggregation will help.... a lot of smart boys in the same place helping each other. Some of the numbers are insane, 41 at WUS, 25 at St Pauls boys, then is is Hamptons/ Wilsons or something which has 20+ ish too. SPGS never seems to publish results for JMC, might this be because they don't want comparisons with the higher achieving boys school?

But for all schools they should publicise it in my opinion, it raises the profile. I do agree there is perhaps some under reporting for girls schools.

G&L have had 2, 5 and 5 Olympiads in the last 3 years. The 2 and 5 are all yr8's and the wording on the other 5 isnt conclusive but sounds like at least 3 were year 8's. (2023)

I think if I concluded that out of all Olympiads overall 3/4 are boys and 80% are Yr8's or vice versa then even at that level it feels prudent from what I've seen anecdotally. At that just 5% of Olympiads would be Yr 7 girls. Not many.

One more thing I've been thinking. I think the Olympiad level is a bit of a red herring imo.

AFAIK most schools take the JMC, some overseas too. Weaker schools just have their top kids sitting the exam. So at kangaroo level 10k from 300k and 3% ish is in reality probably more like 10k from 1m standardised or 1%.

To be honest I think this alone is a great level. Kangaroos should be somewhere around top grade GCSE and A level. Going higher than this feels like overkill. OK some will major in maths in the future but how many will it really be? a small percentage. I'd prefer if this effort was spread elsewhere across other subjects rather than there being specific prep to try and get the JMO count higher as seems to occur at the top boys schools.

Therefore I think what's probably most important is trying get a child into a school with a strong kangaroo cohort which you know doesnt prep for the JMC.

I have never heard of these things before. DS is really good at maths, in a bog-standard comp. Are they private school thing or can anyone enter?

Our son is also at a state school. You have to get the school to apply. It doesn’t cost much. Find a sympathetic teacher and try to get them onside. Our school was skeptical at first but now they have lots of parents wanting to put their kids in for it

JMO results have just been released! Boundaries:

Gold - 42+
Silver - 39+
Bronze - 36+
Distinction - 33+
Merit - 22+

DS9’s school has an inset day so we won’t discover how he did til tomorrow

Very surprised at the narrow bands towards the top end. There could be just 10pts between a 32pt merit and a 42pt gold medal.

Kinda surprised the Merit level is so high. The last 3 years has been quite consistent at 30ish pts (30,30,32) between the Merit and Gold but this year it's only 20pts!

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.

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.

@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!

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.

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

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).

@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.